People, ideas, machines VI: the War Diaries of Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff
A largely unknown British hero, another case study in the unrecognised simplicities of high performance (and relevant to those thinking about nuclear war, AI-alignment etc)
‘People, ideas, machines — in that order!’ Colonel Boyd.
‘Just like all British governments, they will act more or less in a hand to mouth way on the spur of the moment, but they will not think out and adopt a steady policy.’ Earl Cromer, 1896.
‘Every wind that blew swung us like a weathercock. As I was to find out, planned strategy was not Winston’s strong card. He preferred to work by intuition and impulse… God knows where we would be without him, but God knows where we shall go with him.’
Alanbrooke on Churchill, 1941.
‘By general verdict, fearless, formidable, articulate, and in the end convincing.’
Churchill on Alanbrooke
‘It is a most fascinating pastime to follow a great man’s thoughts.’ Pushkin.
‘The arguments of [the ministers] were so puerile that it made me ashamed to think they were Cabinet ministers! It was only too evident that they did not know their subject, had not read the various papers connected with it, and had purely been brought along to support Winston.’ AB, 8 March 1944
‘It is extraordinary how exhausting it is having to drive a plan through against opposition. First on the part of the PM and now on the part of those responsible for it in the [War Office]… The making of plans is just child’s play as compared to putting them into execution.’ AB, 17 August 1944
‘Without him England was lost for a certainty, with him England has been on the verge of disaster time and again… Never have I admired and despised a man simultaneously to the same extent. Never have such opposite extremes been combined in the same human being.’ AB, 10 September 1944
Churchill: Brooke must go! I cannot work with him. He hates me. I can see hatred looking from his eyes.
Ismay goes to Brooke: The Prime Minister says he can't work with you and that you hate him.
Brooke: Hate him? I don't hate him. I love him. But the first time I tell him I agree with him when I don’t will be the time to get rid of me, for then I will be no more use to him.
Churchill [when told, eyes filled with tears]: Dear Brooke!
Recounted by General Ismay
[UPDATED 31/5 (23:02), scroll to 3/7/45, FINISHED! Near the top I’ve added a brief explanation of some committees and positions including CIGS and COS. At the end is a video of Alanbrooke discussing some of the big decisions of the war.]
I've written a few things about the unrecognised simplicities of high performance. E.g In 2016-19 I wrote about ARPA-PARC (and inter alia how lessons from this success could avoid EU procurement law killing people in the next big crisis which it did in 2020). In 2021 I wrote about Lee Kuan Yew. In 2022 I wrote about management at Amazon.
Here is another in this series.
Alanbrooke is one of Britain’s great heroes though not nearly so famous as Nelson or Wellington. Most involved in politics talk a lot about ‘strategy’ but know little or nothing about this crucial strategist of WW2. Other WW2 generals such as Montgomery are much more famous. Alanbrooke was promoted by Churchill to Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) in the dark days of November 1941 as the Nazis approached Moscow. His nickname was ‘Colonel Shrapnel’. His formidable character burst with energy yet he also held himself in incredible control — true leaders, he thought, had to preserve and project self-control (to a degree that would be regarded as ‘unhealthy’ now). He repeatedly deflated Churchill and others, sometimes snapping a pencil between his fingers as he said ‘I flatly disagree’. His relationship with Churchill was stormy. Alanbrooke deeply admired him but the responsibility fell on Alanbrooke, more than anybody, of dealing with Churchill’s flaws and the dangers they risked. In replacing Dill with Alanbrooke, Churchill wanted someone more vigorous to prosecute the war and he got it.
When I thump the table and push my face towards him what does he do? Thumps the table harder and glares back at me. I know these Brookes — stiff-necked Ulstermen and there’s no one worse to deal with than that!
It’s greatly to Churchill’s credit that he appointed him and stuck with him despite extreme disagreements and passions exploding amid the incredible tension of world events and their vast stakes, but it’s also much to his discredit that his memoirs vastly underplayed Alanbrooke’s contributions to victory.
In Alanbrooke’s diaries are reflections on the most basic and important questions of politics and war.
How to define aims?
How to make strategy?
How are aims, ways and means — and strategy, operations, and tactics — related?
How do politics and war affect each other? (E.g the huge political pressure for a western front long before it could be properly supported.)
How much do personalities, ideas and institutions shape crucial events?
How do/can democracies fight closed undemocratic societies?
How to cope with the poor understanding of specialist subjects among MPs? (NB. this was a serious problem 1939-45 when the Commons was incomparably better equipped to discuss military issues than now.)
How do committees work, especially the Chiefs of Staff Committee and the famous committee known as Cabinet (his sometimes despairing descriptions of Cabinet discussions are priceless and remind me vividly of watching Cabinet in 2020)?
What are the iron laws of bureaucracies, even when stakes are existential?
How to think about military/security spending as insurance during peace, what happens if you fail to pay this ‘insurance premium’?
How do alliances work, what causes tensions, what eases them?
What are the unrecognised simplicities of high performance?
The decline and fall of countries and empires.
Alanbrooke was one of those extraordinary people thrown up by war to senior roles who then almost always disappear when the war ends and discussions at the top revert to the norm — avoiding hard questions. It’s as if normal governments can’t deal with such people unless the stakes are existential. General Groves was another such extraordinary character who ran the Manhattan Project and was pushed out of the Pentagon after 1945 for being ‘too difficult’.
After the war Alanbrooke was given some honours and titles but struggled for cash. This hero, who had made such huge contributions to victory, had to sell his house, move into the gardener’s cottage, and sell his beloved bird books for cash. This seems, like the relative funding of Turing and von Neumann for computer research after 1945, to say something profound about Britain’s rapid decline after 1945.
While children and students are told they study history ‘to learn from the mistakes’, one of the most fascinating and striking things about our world is how little learning there is from the greatest of errors. You can read analyses of deterring Prussia/Germany in Whitehall that are practically identical and indistinguishable from 1866, 1870, pre-1914, and the 1930s. You can read history after history of war after war. Human nature and the dynamics of large organisations don’t change so the same problems recur from the start of written history, and nobody can find a way of creating institutions that surmount these problems for long. You may reshape the Prussian General Staff and then reshape the map of Europe but before you know it, you’ve gone from the Elder Moltke working with Bismarck in triumph to his nephew imploding in disaster. One minute Bill Gates; the next, Steve Ballmer. Everything has its time of growth and decay. This means that we stumble into disaster after disaster where the details change but the fundamental patterns don’t. Covid and Ukraine are just the latest examples.
On one hand, we can see abstract principles of high performance a) recur constantly in written history we can all read, b) are extremely simple and do not require high intelligence to understand, and c) when deployed are frequently shocking, even world-changing, as well as sometimes bringing power, wealth and fame to those who deploy them.
But on the other, these principles remain essentially unrecognised by roughly 100% of institutions of all kinds, private and public. Instead, roughly all normal large organisations actually optimise for the opposite principles and promote those who embody these anti-principles. If there is some occasional high performing blip (such as PARC or the Vaccine Taskforce), these normal organisations, and particularly the middle managers within them, will move swiftly to close them and push away those responsible as far and as fast as possible.
This reliable feature of our world has many effects. One of them is that government systems are essentially ‘programmed’ to be slow and inefficient in updating. All institutions optimise for certain things based on incentives and culture. Large established organisations almost always optimise for ‘protect established power networks’, not ‘update useful information even if it disrupts established power networks’. And this means that the old parties, old bureaucracies and old political media are necessarily constantly surprised by events far beyond what they need to be — beyond the inevitable surprises generated by the uncomputable complexity of the world. The most valuable information is and will be almost always at the edge. Elite self-deception was critical to the context of WW2 and looking over the centuries it seems only safe to assume it’s a permanent state of affairs, at least without revolutionary experimentation with institutions that optimise differently and will (we should assume) in their own ways be as, or even more, dangerous. (E.g Increasing the extent to which institutions optimise for better people will also increase the dangers inherent in better people. There is no free Bismarck-scale-winning-without-dangers-of-Bismarck-scale-reward-hacking lunch — at least, not until the alignment problem is solved!)
Is learning in politics/war doomed? No. Just extremely hard, unlikely and it won’t last longer than a few decades at most — when the odd people are replaced, the new ones very likely mean normal performance, and the crucial learning from wars mostly die with the generation. If you study these recurring patterns and have some measure of self-reflection and are willing to make sacrifices (to be or to do?), you can bend history briefly, knowing that your opponents almost definitely could read the same crucial stories as you but almost definitely won’t apply them. This is why I call them the unrecognised simplicities of high performance (pinching the phrase from Charlie Munger on investing).
But there are always costs to choosing ‘to do’ over ‘to be’, and the currency is fear, hatred, jealousy, revenge, poverty, social failure and so on. Colonel Boyd was a hate figure to many and died in poverty. If it were easy, the world would look very different! This is why so many talented people now prefer startups to large companies or government institutions. Startups are a way to do something interesting and important (to do) while often dodging the crippling social and financial penalties of attacking large organisations. It’s safer and better paid to be Steve Jobs than Colonel Boyd. Unfortunately, while startups can solve many problems and could solve more government problems they cannot solve the most important such as intelligence services, WMD and so on.
The goal of these notes is to look for further examples of the unrecognised simplicities seen repeatedly in history and evidence relating to the questions above. I think these diaries will be valuable for others thinking now about existential dangers. Even when people of the stature of FDR, Churchill and Alanbrooke are engaged in a problem as important as *trying to defeat Hitler before he acquires nuclear weapons*, certain types of problem recur and it seems wise and prudent to assume that similar problems will recur for those dealing now with, for example, nuclear escalation or ‘how to develop a realistic plan for AI-alignment so AIs don’t create extreme destruction’. Such problems have crucial hard technological aspects but running in the background are all-too-human psychological aspects combined with all-too-predictable bureaucratic dynamics that suppress sensible thinking, put exactly the wrong people in charge of critical things, empower the most self-interested power-seeking people and so on.
Introduction
The diaries were written in the form of notes to his second wife (his first died in a car crash).
On the front page was written:
ON NO ACCOUNT MUST THE CONTENTS OF THIS BOOK BE PUBLISHED.
The originals were written in notebooks and lodged with his wife. After the war he read them and wrote some notes which appear in italics in the full edition. (I’ll also put them in italics.) A version of the diaries was published in the 1950s by Sir Arthur Bryant but Bryant edited them heavily in particular to remove much criticism of Churchill. The diaries refer to many secrets such as the work of Bletchley though this was a highly classified secret long after the war and was cut by Bryant. Read the new uncut version (with the cover in the picture above), not Bryant’s.
During the war Alanbrooke noted that Churchill never spoke publicly of the Chiefs of Staff committee and its contributions, and suspected an unworthy motive — that Churchill didn’t want anything undermining praise for him. When Churchill’s wartime memoirs were published, Alanbrooke was annoyed and upset by what he saw as important unfairness (e.g Churchill’s treatment of Dill and others) and distortion of the record. The Cabinet Secretary wished that Alanbrooke had not published until after Churchill’s death.
I’ll start when he’s appointed in 1941 but will fill in the earlier time later. I’ll update this roughly daily from Monday (planning fallacy allowing). Italics are AB notes post-war, bold is all me.
Other things coming… E.g promised thoughts on Nietzsche, a recent biography of James Angleton (head of counterintelligence for CIA), and I’ll have to get to Sunak and the state of Westminster but am delayed by the feeling of physical sickness when I start to think about that…
I did a podcast that just went live, do not read the transcript as I think the AI struggled with my accent.
CIGS, COS etc
Alanbrooke was made Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) in November 1941, formally taking the office on 25 December.
Alanbrooke was also the army representative on the crucial Chiefs of Staff Committee (COS). COS was established in 1923 as a subcommittee of the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID was established in the aftermath of the Boer War debacle in 1904). COS was the critical administrative organisation for discussions and decisions regarding the conduct of the war.
Churchill made AB chairman of COS on 5 March 1942.
AB, supported by the heads of the Navy and Air Force, thought it the role of the COS to hash out the most difficult issues and find compromises. They resisted the idea of an ‘independent’ chairman. They thought that if they could not agree then the issue was clearly critical and therefore rightly decided at the political level. All three service chiefs attended Cabinet. Their chairman spoke with their authority. There were two (!) First Sea Lords.
COS was served by subcommittees and joint staffs. The most important were the Joint Planning Committee and Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). The Secretariat was responsible for enforcing action, reporting back, and integrating decisions across multiple entities, as well as acting as a subset of the Secretariat of the War Cabinet.
General Pug Ismay was head of the Military Secretariat. He understood Whitehall machinery thoroughly. Churchill was also Minister of Defence and he made Ismay Principal Staff Officer to the Minister of Defence. Ismay attended all meetings of COS. The wrong person could have caused havoc with this influence and access to the PM. Ismay conducted affairs with brilliance, tact and integrity. Crucially he got on well with Churchill, knew how to play him, but worked with COS, not for his own agenda.
Nye, who Churchill had considered for CIGS, was VCIGS and handled most of the detail of purely Army work while AB focused on the biggest issues and problems, crucial personnel decisions including many hard conversations with people who had to be moved, the PM and War Cabinet, coordinating with the key Americans and so on.
(If any reader is aware of a study of how these committees and staff worked, in the most detail possible, please leave references. Such issues are extremely relevant today. When I arrived in No10 in 2019 I asked some questions about organisation. One was, ‘What is the entity responsible for thinking about a conflict, say with Russia, across all domains — air, space, cyber etc — plus special forces, diplomatic, economic, weird psyops, everything?’ The answer: There is no such entity. (The answer is similar when it comes to another crucial question, ‘what entity thinks about prioritisation of very punchy intelligence operations?’) This is deeply connected to the hopeless No10/Cabinet Office organisation in Q1 2020 for covid and connected to the horrific shambles of ‘strategy’ viz Russia now. (If you asked my question again now, people would look confused then say something like ‘I guess some subset of Cabinet or the NSC…?’ and look uncertain or glum.) As I often point out, nothing is of less interest in SW1 than management so there is no media analysis of this fundamental issue. In summer 2020 we started a process to think through this fundamental reorganisation.
Many of the processes that worked very well during WW2, including aspects of technological intelligence, were almost immediately wrecked after the war, a subject I will return to.)
(From Chapter IX of Fraser’s biography of Alanbrooke.)
1939
1940
1941
…
Sunday 16 November (Appointed CIGS)
[Invited to Chequers on 13/11.]
After dinner PM took me off to his study and told me that as Dill had had a very hard time and was a tired man he wanted to relieve him… He then went on to say that he wanted me to take over from Dill, and asked me whether I was prepared to do so.
It took me some time to reply as I was torn by many feelings. I hated the thought of old Dill going and our very close association coming to an end. I hated the thought of what this would mean for him. The thought of the magnitude of the job and the work entailed took the wind out of my sails. The fact that the extra work and ties would necessarily mean seeing far less of you tore at my heartstrings. And finally a feeling of sadness at having to give up Home Forces after having worked them up to their present pitch.
The PM misunderstood my silence and said ‘Do you not think you will be able to work with me? We have so far got on well together.’ I had to assure him that those were not my thoughts, though I am well aware that my path will not be strewn with rose petals. But I have the greatest respect for him and real affection for him, so that I hope I may be able to stand the storms of abuse which I may well have to bear frequently. He then went on to explain the importance he attached to the appointment and the fact that the Chiefs of Staff Committee must be the body to direct military events over the whole world. He also stated that his relations with me must for now approximate those of a Prime Minister to one of his ministers. Nothing could have been kinder than he was, and finally when we went to bed at 2 am he came with me to my bedroom to get away from the others, took my hand and looking into my eyes with an exceptionally kind look said, ‘I wish you the very best of luck.’
I got into my bed with my brain in a whirl trying to fathom the magnitude of the task I am about to take on. I have no false conceptions as to the magnitude of the task and of the doubts whether I shall be able to compete with it. If it was in peace time I should love to try it, but in war the responsibility is almost overwhelming. The consequences of failure or mistakes are a nightmare to think about. I pray God from the very bottom of my heart that he might give me guidance and be at my side in the times I may have to go through. And then I have you, oh my darling, as my lighthouse in all stormy seas. Bless you for the help which you are to me. Many, many thoughts kept galloping through my head and by 4 am I was still tossing about without sleep.
There is no doubt that I was temporarily staggered by the magnitude of the task I was undertaking. Let it be remembered the situation we were in at that time, left alone and unsupported in the war against Germany. Let it be remembered the task we had in defeating Germany in the First World War, when we had the assistance of a strong France, Italy, Russia and finally the USA. Now we were faced with a possible invasion across the Channel, with increasing difficulties in the Middle East, a closed Mediterranean, dark clouds growing in the Far East and not an ally left to help us. The horizon was black from end to end with only one shaft of light, in the possible entry of America into the war. To pick up the strategic reins of the War Office at such a moment was surely sufficient to cause one the deepest of anxiety.
Added to that was the certain trial of working hand-in-hand with Winston in handling the direction of the war. I had seen enough of him to realise his impetuous nature, his gambler’s spirit, and his determination to follow his own selected path at all costs, to realise fully what I was faced with. I can remember clearly that after he had taken me away to his study* and had offered me this appointment, he left me alone temporarily to rejoin the others. I am not an exceptionally religious person, but I am not ashamed to confess that as soon as he was out of the room my first impulse was to kneel down and pray to God for guidance and support in the task I had undertaken. [*Does anybody know if the study WSC used then was the little study that’s now on the ground floor near the dining room?]
18/11
[AB spoke to Dill who told him WSC had originally intended to give the job to Archie Nye and ‘Dill had a job to rid him of this idea’. Nye told Churchill that AB was the ‘only one conceivable choice’. Nye was very able but too inexperienced.]
19/11
[The papers published news of his appointment.]
I suppose I ought to be very grateful and happy reaching the top of the ladder. I can’t say that I do. I feel a heavy depression at Dill going after the close contacts I have had with him ever since the war started. I had never hoped or aspired at reaching these dizzy heights and now that I am stepping up onto the plateau land of my military career the landscape looks cold, black and lonely, with a ghastly responsibility hanging as a black thunder cloud over me. Perhaps I'm feeling liverish for want of exercise today!
[AB took over from Dill practically on 1/12, officially from 25/12.]
I was taking over at a difficult moment as far as the Far East was concerned. Dark clouds had been gathering fast on this horizon and everything pointed towards an early entry of Japan into the war. On the other hand, it was essential that we should take no step that might precipitate hostile actions with Japan without the entry of the USA into the war. Had we known that the Pearl Harbor attack would eventually start hostilities, matters would have been greatly simplified, and we should have known for certain that the USA would be irrevocably dragged into the war. I had discussed the possibility of Japan entering the war with Dill. He had told me frankly that he had done practically nothing to meet this threat. He said that we were already so weak on all fronts that it was impossible to denude them any further to meet a possible threat. I think he was quite right in his dispositions and that he could not have done more to meet the probable Japanese entry into the war. It was undoubtedly correct not to create general weakness on all fronts in an attempt to meet all possible threats, but it left us in a lamentably dangerous position on the entry of Japan into the wall.
3/12
[At COS meeting] Pug Ismay produced a memo from PM to the effect that 18th and 50th [divisions] were to be offered to the Russians for their Southern front! Eden to make this offer to Stalin during his impending visit to Moscow! This would probably mean having to close down the Libyan offensive, whereas I am positive that our policy for the conduct of the war should be to direct both our military and political efforts towards the early conquest of North Africa. From there we shall be able to reopen the Mediterranean and to stage offensive operations against Italy.
It is interesting to note that already on December 3rd, my third day as CIGS, I had a clear-cut idea as to what our policy should be. America was not even in the war at that time, and it was not yet possible to foresee our combined landings in Algeria and Morocco. Nevertheless it was already clear to me that we must clear North Africa to open the Mediterranean, and until we had done that we should never have enough shipping to stage major operations. It is some gratification to look back now, knowing that this policy was carried out, but only after many struggles and much opposition from many quarters.
At Cabinet Defence Committee, 530:
… Luckily we succeeded in riding PM off such a suggestion [the divisions to Russia] but only at expense of some 500 tanks to be sent to Russia, this according to Beaverbrook’s suggestion [the diaries are full of loathing for Beaverbrook whom AB detested and thought brought out the worst faults of WSC]. Tried to begin to make them realise that we must have one definite policy for the conduct of the war. I must get the PM to see the advantages of a real North African offensive policy.
I remember well being appalled in those early days of my time as CIGS to find the lack of a definite policy for the prosecution of the war. We worked from day to day, a hand to mouth existence with a policy based on opportunism. Every wind that blew swung us as a weathercock. As I was to find out, planned strategy was not Winston’s strong card. He preferred to work by intuition and impulse.
4/12
At War Cabinet:
… I had to state results of my investigation as to whether any tanks could be spared for Eden to offer to Stalin... I did not recommend such a gift as we should be seriously denuding this country and prematurely disclosing a new pattern of tank. Painted a picture of possible tank battles in this country such as were taking place in Libya. These gave Kingsley Wood [Chancellor] the shivers and he appealed to PM not to contemplate denuding this country. Debate became interminable. Anthony Eden like a peevish child grumbling because he was being sent off to see Uncle Stalin without suitable gifts, while Granny Churchill was comforting him and explaining to him all the pretty speeches he might make instead. Finally Eden succeeded in swinging Churchill around to a gift of some 300 tanks and 300 aircraft. During most of the debate the conduct of the war seemed to have been pushed into the background, self interests seemed to predominate. [So Cabinet in 1941 similar to 2020, minus constant leaking.]
After dinner met at 10 pm with the Prime Minister presiding, and Atlee and Anthony Eden present. During the dinner interval the PM had swung right round again [with a new scheme of gifts]… Portal agreed, but said offer was too definite. This produced the most awful outburst of temper, we were told that we did nothing but obstruct his intentions, we had no ideas of our own, and whenever he produced ideas we produced nothing but objections etc etc! Attlee pacified him once, but he broke out again, then Anthony Eden soothed him temporarily, but to no avail. Finally he looked at his papers for some 5 minutes, then slammed them together, closed the meeting and walked out of the room! It was pathetic and entirely unnecessary. We were only trying to save him from making definite promises which he might find hard to keep later on. This is all the result of overworking himself and keeping too late hours. Such a pity. God knows where we would be without him, but God knows where we shall go with him!
The next morning WSC redrafted the memo in line with advice from the night before. AB saw the Japanese military attaché who looked ‘gloomy’: ‘I wonder whether we should have them with us much longer!’ The next day came signals of Japanese convoys moving but their aim was unclear. On 7th there was a COS meeting discussing war with Japan and how to ‘ensure that in every case the USA would not be left out’.
After dinner on 7th he learned ‘from the wireless’ of the Pearl Harbor attack. (Seems extraordinary that the BBC could get the news and broadcast it before CIGS was told?)
The Japs themselves have now ensured that the USA are in the war.
On 8th Churchill said he would head for America but that AB should remain and he would take Dill and others.
9/12:
[Pearl Harbor] has entirely upset the balance in Pacific and leaves Japs masters of the ocean until we can assemble some forces there.
On 10/12 AB was told the Prince of Wales and Repulse had been sunk.
This on top of the tragedy of Honolulu puts us in a very serious position for the prosecution of the war. It means that for Africa eastwards to America through the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, we have lost command of the sea. This affects reinforcements to Middle East, India, Burma, Far East, Australia and New Zealand!… [PM] had stood shock well.
On 11/12 AB persuaded WSC to make Dill our representative there.
[F]ew men did more in furthering our cause of final victory than Dill. From the very start he built up a deep friendship with Marshall and proved to be an invaluable link between British and American Chiefs of Staff. It is unfortunate that Winston never gave him the credit that was due to him. I look upon that half hour’s discussion with Winston at 10 Downing Street on December 11th as one of my most important accomplishments during the war, or at any rate amongst those that bore the most fruit.
16/12 (after WSC gone to US):
Lunched with de Gaulle, a most unattractive specimen. We made a horrid mistake when we decided to make use of him!
20/12:
My hopes of carrying on with the conquest and reclamation of North Africa are beginning to look more and more impossible every day. From now on the Far East will make ever increasing inroads into our resources. The loss of the American battleships and the Prince of Wales and Repulse will take a long time to recover, and meanwhile we shall suffer many more losses in the Far East.
The situation was such that AB stayed in London and worked on Christmas Day, reading papers and sending messages to WSC in Washington. News came through that Hong Kong had fallen the night before. Resources did not allow Britain to do all it needed and wanted in Europe, Middle East and Far East.
We have laid down that first of all in importance come security of this country and its communications and after that Singapore and communications through the Indian Ocean. This is correct as if the latter go the Middle East or possibly India may follow suit.
The situation was evidently fraught with many dangers and a false step at this stage might well lead to the worst of catastrophes. Operations in North Africa were evidently dependent on many factors, and we were not in a position at that moment to undertake further commitments until we could see more clearly how we stood. Winston was never good at looking at all the implications of any course of action which he favoured! In fact, he frequently refused to look at them. I was consequently at that time filled with fears lest some decision might be arrived by him whilst away in USA which would launch us into a new commitment at this critical juncture.
29/12:
… I found new wires had been received from the PM at 5 am suggesting that new Combined Command should be formed in the Far East under Wavell!, with USA deputy [Commander-in-Chief] and American naval forces under Wavell. Special body in Washington to control operations under PM and USA president. The whole scheme wild and half baked and only catering for one area of action namely Western Pacific, one enemy Japan, and no central control…
I remember well the two points that worried me about this telegram were that in the first place we were setting up a local organisation to deal with one specific theatre and one enemy, whilst what was really required was a global organisation providing for central control for all fronts and both enemies. Secondly, I could see no reason why at this stage, with American forces totally unprepared to play a major part, we should agree to a central control in Washington.
1942
[Repeated comments about the slowness of meetings with Dudley Pound (First Sea Lord) chairing, and post-war comments that he didn’t realise how ill Pound was. Crisis building in Jan in Singapore and Burma: should we send reinforcements to Singapore or Burma, given likely events?]
The problem was a difficult one, the retention of Singapore was certainly the most important for the future prosecution of the war, and for the protection of our communications through the Indian Ocean. On the other hand, reinforcements for Singapore might well be too late, as turned out to be the case with the 18th Division, whilst reinforcements to Burma might still save the situation there and secure Eastern approaches to India. Looking back on our decision to send 18th Division to Singapore, in the light of after events, I think we were wrong to send it to Singapore, and that it would have served a more useful purpose had it been sent to Rangoon.
27 Jan (called to see WSC re a speech to the Commons, vote of no confidence on 29/1, 464-1):
The interview was typical of many future ones of this kind. The scene in his bedroom was always the same and I only wish some artist could have committed it to canvas. The red and gold dressing gown in itself was worth going miles to see, and only Winston could've thought of wearing it! He looked rather like some Chinese Mandarin! The few hairs were usually ruffled on his bald head. A large cigar stuck sideways out of his face. The bed was littered with papers and despatches. Sometimes the tray with his finished breakfast was still on the bed table. The bell was continually being run for secretaries, typists, stenographers, or his faithful valet Sawyers.
As well as the growing crisis with Singapore, AB was also plagued by problems with Auchinleck, who took over from Wavell as commander-in-chief Middle East command in June 1941.
I was at that time beginning to be upset by many messages that emanated from Auchinleck’s office. I was beginning to be suspicious that ‘Chink’ Dorman-Smith, one of his staff officers, was beginning to exercise far too much influence on him. Dorman-Smith had a most fertile brain, continually producing new ideas, some of which (not many) were good and the rest useless. Archie Wavell had made use of him but was wise enough to discard all the bad and only retain the good. Auchinleck was incapable of doing so and allowed himself to fall far too deeply under Chink’s influence. This became one, and possibly the major, cause of his downfall!
30 Jan:
… Singapore is in a bad way. The defence is retiring onto the island tonight. I doubt whether the island holds out very long. The Benghazi business is bad and nothing less than bad generalship on the part of Auchinleck. He has been overconfident and has believed everything his over optimistic [director of military intelligence] Sheerer has told him. As a result he was not in a position to meet a counter blow.
I had been questioning him for some time as regards his intelligence reports which made out Rommel’s strength as considerably lower than [War Office] estimates. I finally discovered that Sheerer had been basing his estimate of the enemy strength on far too heavy German and Italian casualties...
The results of these underestimates lulled Auchinleck into a false sense of security which turned out to be most unfortunate. Auchinleck, to my mind, had most of the qualifications to make him one of the finest of commanders, but unfortunately he lacked the one most important of all — the ability to select the men to serve him. The selection of Corbett as his Chief of Staff, Dorman-Smith as his chief advisor, and Shearer as head of intelligence, contributed most of all to his downfall. [PEOPLE, IDEAS, MACHINES!]
This morning Defence Committee on provision of tanks for Far East. Although it is quite evident that we are incurring grave danger by going on supplying tanks to Russia it is Beaverbrook’s firm intention that we should go on doing so, and he controls PM on such matters.
2 Feb, 5pm Cabinet:
… As usual most unpleasant remarks by various ministers in connection with defeats of our forces! As we had retired into Singapore Island …, besides being pushed back in Libya, I had a good deal to account for and found it hard to keep my temper with some of the criticisms that were raised. However we finally turned to discuss one para connected with Lend Lease Bill... The meeting then became a complete parrot house!
These were very difficult times for me in the Cabinet and Winston was the worst offender. He came out continually with remarks such as: ‘Have you not got a single general in that army who can win battles, have none of them any ideas, must we continually lose battles in this way etc etc. Such remarks lowered the confidence of other ministers in the efficiency of the army, and could be nothing but detrimental in the present crisis. He could have said anything he liked to me in private but not in front of the whole Cabinet. [Boris made the same mistake. He combined a) sarcastic critical remarks in front of dozens on Zoom (‘the civil service is like Clouseau’s clown car’, which he enjoyed as a joke so repeated) with b) near-total (except when totally panicked) refusal to speak seriously to the Cabinet Secretary about personnel failures and insist on changes. This combination was the worst of all worlds: it meant he spread general demoralisation made worse by the fact that the great officials knew he would not remove those actually failing, hence further demoralisation. A PM should refrain from indulgent sarcasm in large groups but be ruthless in forcing personnel changes. The inability of almost all MPs to do this reflects their time horizons: nothing is so difficult or important as removing duffers but it means short-term pain and only (maybe) long-term gain.]
4 Feb:
… The situation as regards shipping is most disturbing and one that the PM will not face, and yet it is the one situation which will affect our whole strategy during the coming year.
Until we could open up the Mediterranean we should remain one million tons short of shipping, and shipping must exercise a stranglehold on all our strategy. Yet for the present, with the entry of Japan into the war, and reverses in North Africa, the basic strategy at which I was aiming, of clearing North Africa, opening Mediterranean, and threatening southern Europe, had shrunk into the background.
9 Feb:
… Ever since Portal and Pound came back from the USA I have told them that they ‘sold the birthright for a plate of porridge’ while in Washington. They have, up to now, denied it flatly. However this morning they were at last beginning to realise that the Americans are rapidly snatching more and more power with the ultimate intention of running the war in Washington! However, I now have them on my side.
An unpleasant Cabinet meeting. The news had just arrived that the Japs had got onto Singapore Island. As a result nothing but abuse for the army. The Auk’s {Auchinleck] retreat in Cyrenaica is also making matters more sour! Finally this evening, at 10.45, I was sent for by PM to assist him in drafting a telegram to Wavell about the defence of Singapore, and the need for Staffs and Commanders to perish at their post.
11 Feb:
… PM sent for me this evening to discuss with him last wire from Wavell about Singapore from where he had just returned. It was a very gloomy wire and a depressing wire as regards the fighting efficiency of the troops on Singapore Island. It is hard to see why a better defence is not being put up, but I presume there must be some good reason. I can’t see the place holding out more than a day or so now. The losses on the island will be vast, not only in men but in material.
I have during the last 10 years had an unpleasant feeling that the British Empire was decaying and that we were on a slippery decline!! I wonder if I was right? I certainly never expected that we should fall to pieces as fast as we are and to see Hong Kong and Singapore go in less than 3 months plus failure in the Western Desert is far from reassuring! We've had a wonderful power of recuperation in the past. I wonder whether we shall again bring off a comeback?
12 Feb:
We are paying very heavily now for failing to face the insurance premiums essential for security of an empire! This has usually been the main cause for the loss of Empires in the past. [In 2020-1 over a 100,000 died, businesses failed, and suffering was vast because of a failure to ‘face the insurance premiums’ in the form of serious thinking, planning and investments for the predictable crisis of a pandemic. We’re doing the same now on multiple fronts: e.g pandemics, Chinese infiltration of critical infrastructure, AI etc.]
Entries for these days are very black. In contrast to his frequent criticisms of WSC he wrote on 16/2:
… PM on the whole in a very good mood.
This was typical of Winston, in a real crisis he was always at his best, and stood all the heavy shocks without flinching.
17/2:
… Then 1/2 hour with [Secretary of State] mainly to discuss political situation, and demand for a Defence Minister separate from the PM. An absolute impossibility with a personality such as his.
Frequently when the situation was bad there were suggestions that a separate Chairman for the COS should be found, or a deputy Defence Minister interposed between PM and the COS. None of these alternatives was either possible or necessary. To my mind the PM in war must always deal directly with the COS, and the members of the COS must defend their actions personally in the Cabinet, using their Chairman as spokesman. The introduction of an outside chairman will never smooth over differences between members of the COS if these exist. Should there be such differences there is only one course, to change some or all members of the COS. It is essential that these three men should work together as a perfect trinity.
… I'm getting more and more worried by old Dudley Pound as First Sea Lord, with an old dodderer like him it is quite impossible for the COS to perform the function it should in the biggest Imperial war we are ever likely to be engaged in! He is asleep during 75% of the time he should be working.
In the British system there are also legal/constitutional reasons why a PM may want to make themselves SoS and why it might make sense. Such considerations are connected to why issues such as, for example, warrants are today handled by the Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary, i.e to distance the PM from responsibility (rather than enhance it).
18/2:
Burma news now bad. Cannot work out why troops are not fighting better. If the army cannot fight better than it is doing at present we shall deserve to lose our Empire!
On 19/2 there was a reshuffle:
A smaller [Cabinet] and much more efficient. Beaverbrook is out of it!! That is the greatest Godsend. He is off to America… With a small War Cabinet like that we ought to be able to get on much faster. But the greatest blessing of all is to be rid of Beaverbrook! [The near-irrelevance of Cabinet now is directly connected to its size. Like many things, the ideal time to grasp this nettle was immediately after the 2019 election but this chance too was missed.]
21/2:
A bad day! COS meeting from 10.30 am to 1.30 pm, and again from 4 pm to 7 pm, and finally Pacific Council from 9.30 to 11:30 pm. And all to do the work which could be done by one man in one hour!! And what’s worse, when finished the work was not worth the paper it was written on!
All connected with the use of Dutch shipping in Java… I know well from personal experience that whatever we may say, the man on the spot is in the end the only one who can judge.
22/2 bad news from Burma. Britain wanted to divert a convoy there to prop it up. Australia, deeply worried by their own position, refused. Burma was lost. In the chaos over this command structures changed — agreements made on WSC’s trip to Washington, which AB deplored, were undone much to AB’s delight:
It is now quite clear that we can … run the war on a rational basis! So far there is very little that was settled at Washington which is surviving the test of time. Burma has gone back to India, ABDA and ANZAC become one, Pacific Council goes West, and for that matter so does the Combined Chiefs of Staff — and thank God for it!! We shall now run the war with two main spheres of interest: the Americans running the Pacific up to Asia, including Australia and New Zealand, and a British one running the opposite way round the globe, including Middle East, India, Burma and Indian Ocean.
25/2
Cabinet again discussed sending aircraft to Russia.
As usual failed to have any deduction made and informed that political aspect of keeping our promise to Russia overtook all strategical considerations! Personally I consider it absolute madness. We have never even asked Russia to inform us of the real degree of urgency of these reinforcement
We had been put on the wrong foot from the very start by Beaverbrook in his mission to Moscow as regards the supply of equipment to Russia. His policy was to pour everything into their lap without even asking whether it was needed, and without ever asking anything in return. As a result we kept on supplying tanks and aeroplanes that could ill be spared and in doing so suffered the heaviest losses in shipping conveying this equipment to Arctic Russia. We receive nothing in return except abuse for handling the convoys inefficiently! We had absolutely no information as to what the Russian situation was as regards equipment. Russia even refused to keep us informed as to the distribution of her forces, and the only way in which I knew Russian dispositions was through German messages which we intercepted. I do not pretend for one moment that Russia was not playing a vital part in the war and bearing the maximum brunt of the land warfare. I fully agree that it was essential to retain Russia in the war and to assist her to do so, but this would in no way have precluded getting full of value for what we were doing.
2/3
More chaos caused by WSC trying to wire Auchinleck to attack faster, ‘another example of Winston’s interference with a commander in the field’ without being familiar with all aspects of the situation.
3/3
AB sent a tank expert to help Auchinleck but later admitted he’d never expected Auchinleck to ignore him.
4/4
A long and protracted COS taken up mainly with a heated argument as regards relative advantages between a single commander (or generalissimo), as opposed to the usual trinity of the three services. I was supporting the former and was being strongly opposed by [Chief of the Naval Staff] and [Chief of the Air Staff]! The case in point being Ceylon… The argument itself and impossibility of arriving at any agreement convinced me more than anything else that I was right!
5/3
AB dined with PM and Eden. PM was contemplating resigning shortly ‘if necessary’ (AB implies over the India Bill). Discussion of invasion of France to relieve pressure on Russia. PM told AB he should take over chairing COS meetings from Pound (why wasn’t this automatic when AB became CIGS?).
PM also made Mountbatten Chief of Combined Operations and invited him to COS meetings. AB says a) he did a good job in the role, b) it was a waste of time to invite him to COS meetings, c) the title was bad as ‘every operation we were engaged in was a “combined” one’ and it was ‘certainly not intended that he should direct combined strategy — his job was to evolve the technique, policy and equipment for the employment of the three services in combined operations to effect landings against opposition.’
Pound showed his class by arriving early for the first meeting AB would chair and sat in AB’s seat leaving the chairman’s seat empty.
11/3
Many of the RAF think that bombing alone could bring Germany ‘to her knees’. It therefore wanted to build aircraft suitable for this mission. Therefore the army was ‘starved’ of types available for support of land forces. It was ‘uphill work’ for AB in forcing the RAF and Air Ministry to prioritise this. (Cf. inter alia 29/4.)
24/3
WSC again trying to replace Auchinleck [not a bad instinct] with unsuitable people. AB finds it ‘very exhausting, this continual protecting of Auchinleck, especially as I have not got the highest opinion of him!’
28 March, COS:
We were discussing ways and means of establishing new Western Front. I had propounded theory that the Western front, to be of use, must force withdrawal of forces from Russia, that it was impossible with the land forces at our disposal to force the Germans to withdraw land forces from Russia; but that we might induce them to withdraw air forces. But to do this a landing must take place within our air umbrella, namely in vicinity of Calais or Boulogne. Mountbatten was still hankering after a landing near Cherbourg where proper air support is not possible.
30/3
He discussed the western front with WSC.
A difficult problem — this universal cry to start a western front is going to be hard to compete with, and yet what can we do with some 10 divisions against the German masses? Unfortunately the country fails to realise the situation we are in.
This situation grew more and more difficult: the Beaverbrook press influencing public outlook in the direction of western front, Albert Hall meetings, Trafalgar Square meetings, vast crowds shouting for immediate help for the Russians. Many seemed to imagine that Russia had only come into the war for our benefit! Certainly very few of them realised that a premature Western front could only result in the most appalling shambles which must inevitably reduce the chances of ultimate victory to a minimum.
31/3
The last day of the first quarter of 1942, fateful year in which we have already lost a large proportion of the British Empire, and are on the high road to lose a great deal more of it!
During the last fortnight I have had for the first time since the war started a growing conviction that we are going to lose this war unless we control it very differently and fight it with greater determination. But to begin with a democracy is it a great disadvantage against a dictatorship when it comes to war. Secondly a government with only one big man in it, and that one man a grave danger in many respects, is in a powerless way. Party politics, party interests, still override larger war issues. Petty jealousies colour discussions and influence destinies. Politicians still suffer from that little knowledge of military matters which gives them unwarranted confidence that they are born strategists! As a result they confuse issues, affect decisions, and convert simple problems and plans into confused tangles and hopeless muddles.
It is all desperately depressing. Furthermore it is made worse by the lack of good military commanders. Half our Corps and Divisional Commanders are totally unfit for their appointments, and yet if I were to sack them I could find no better! They lack character, imagination, drive and power of leadership. The reason for this state of affairs is to be found in the losses we sustained in the last war of all our best officers, who should now be our senior commanders. I wonder if we shall muddle through this time as we have done in the past? There are times when I wish to God I had not been placed at the helm of a ship that seems to be heading inevitably for the rocks. It is a great honour to find oneself entrusted with such a task, and the hope of saving the ship a most inspiring thought and one that does override all others. But may God help me in my task.
In April the Japanese fleet moved into the Indian Ocean.
7/4:
[F]rantic calls for air support from Wavell, which according to Portal there is little chance of meeting. I suppose this Empire has never been in such a precarious position throughout its history. I do not like the look of things. And yet a miracle saved us at Dunkirk and we may pull through this time. But I wish I could see more daylight as to how we are to keep going through 1942!
A very gloomy Cabinet meeting! Both Bevin and Alexander reporting Labour disenchantment at course of war and difficulty of not being able to give them a full account.
8/4 Hopkins and Marshall arrived from DC.
9/4 Marshall pushed a western front ‘next September’ (i.e 1942] but said the total force they could transport would be ‘2½ Divisions!! No very great contribution. Furthermore they had not begun to realise what all the implications of their proposed plan were.’
I liked what I saw of Marshall, a pleasant and easy man to get on with, rather over-filled with his own importance. But I should not put him down as a great man.
These first impressions of mine about Marshall are interesting and of course incomplete. They were based on the day’s discussions, which had made it quite clear that Marshall had up to date only touched the fringe of all the implications of a re-entry into France. In the light of the existing situation his plans for September 1942 were just fantastic! Marshall had a long way to go at that time before realising what we were faced with.
After the entry of 13/4 AB added: ‘A big man and a very great gentleman, who inspired trust, but did not impress me by the ability of his brain.’
10/4:
A very busy day which started with usual COS meeting, mainly concerned in trying to save India from the Japs. A gloomy prospect with loss of command of sea and air. [Chequers for dinner and the night with Hopkins and Marshall.]
I remember being amused at Marshall’s reactions to Winston’s late hours, he was evidently not used to being kept out of his bed till the small hours of the morning and not enjoying it much! He certainly had a much easier time of it working with Roosevelt, he informed me that he frequently did not see him for a month or six weeks. [True?] I was fortunate if I did not see Winston for 6 hours.
On 14/4 amid meetings AB’s wife was taken ill which ‘remained a source of deep anxiety for some time to come’, after seeing her he returned to the War Office then to Downing Street for a Defence Committee attended by Hopkins and Marshall — a reminder that almost always missing from history books is such background to the mental state of crucial players.
A momentous meeting at which we accepted their proposals for offensive action in Europe in 1942 perhaps and in 1943 for certain. They have not begun to realise all the implications of this plan and all the difficulties that lie ahead of us!…
With the situation prevailing at that time it was not possible to take Marshall’s ‘castles in the air’ too seriously! It must be remembered that we were at that time literally hanging on by our eye-lids. Australia and India were threatened by the Japanese, we had temporarily lost control of the Indian Ocean, the Germans were threatening Persia and our oil, Auchinleck was in precarious straits in the desert, and the submarine sinkings were heavy. Under such circumstances we were temporarily on the defensive, and when we returned to the offensive certain definite steps were necessary.
We were desperately short of shipping and could stage no large scale operations without additional shipping. This shipping could only be obtained by opening the Mediterranean and saving a million tons of shipping through the elimination of the Cape route. To clear the Mediterranean, North Africa must be cleared first. We might certainly start preparing plans for the European offensive, but such plans must not be allowed to interfere with the successive stages of operations essential to the ultimate execution of this plan.
15/4
Meeting with Marshall.
He is, I should think, a good general at raising armies and providing the necessary links between the military and political worlds. But his strategical ability does not impress me at all! In fact in many respects he is a very dangerous man whilst being a very charming one.
MacArthur wants to focus forces in Australia for the Pacific. Marshall wants to land in Europe but has no plan for what next — ‘I asked him this afternoon — do we go east, south or west after landing? He had not begun to think of it!’ AB stressed to Marshall that landing was the easy bit, after that they faced superior German forces that could be reinforced faster and were better trained ‘whilst ours were raw and inexperienced’.
I saw a great deal of him throughout the rest of the war, and the more I saw of him the more clearly I appreciated that his strategic ability was of the poorest. A great man, a great gentleman and great organiser, but definitely not a strategist. I found that his stunted strategic outlook made it very difficult to discuss strategic plans with him, for the good reason that he did not understand them personally but backed the briefs prepared by his staff.
On 21/4 there is an interesting reference to discussion with WSC and ‘advisability or otherwise of making a declaration that we should make use of gas if Germans made use of it against Russians’. [Someone once told me that we dropped film into Germany of experiments using anthrax on sheep on a Scottish island, i.e a clear threat of bio-warfare. Is this true? My first thought is a) I’m glad we were not first users of such weapons, b) first use would have been justified had we got intelligence of Hitler being sufficiently advanced (don’t have a clear picture of what this means) in his nuclear program, e.g dropping anthrax on their equivalent of Los Alamos (if it was practical). As far as I can tell, although there was a large intelligence operation on German nuclear research there was no effort to, for example, assassinate German nuclear scientists.]
28/4
An important COS meeting at which I assembled the [Quartermaster-General] and his opposite numbers from Admiralty and Air Ministry with the object of forming an Administrative Chiefs of Staff Committee to work in close cooperation with us in connection with proposed large scale offensive in 1943.
29/4 AB pushed SoS for Air on need for greater support for land forces and would have liked to tell him ‘even more plainly that he was deliberately speaking untruths’; PM backed AB and stressed need for more air support for the army.
8/5, COS meeting considering another wire from Auchinleck proposing delay:
I do not like his message — it is a bad one based purely on number of tanks and not on the strategical situation. He never takes into account danger Malta is exposed to through his proposed delays.
At a later Cabinet, AB proposed not trying to force Auchinleck to attack on 15/5, accept the delay to 15/6, coordinate with running of convoy to Malta. PM and Cabinet said ‘attack should if possible be delivered before the end of May’.
On 10/5 Auchinleck replied with another ‘very bad telegram in which he entirely failed to realise the importance of Malta and overestimated the danger to Egypt in the event of his being defeated’. Again they tried to chivvy him.
12 May, meeting with Evatt from Australia, ‘a thoroughly unpleasant type of individual with no outlook beyond the shores of Australia’:
I did my level best to make him listen to a short statement of the global situation, and where the main dangers existed. He refused to listen and gave me the impression that as far as he was concerned he did not mind what happened to anybody else as long as Australian shores could be made safe. It was quite impossible to make him realise that the security of Australia did not rest in Australia. He failed to see that defeat in the Middle East, India and Indian Ocean must inevitably lead to the invasion of Australia, no matter what reinforcements were sent them now.
[This is a good example of the sort of really big decision, visible only when you zoom out to look at a relatively abstract picture, that’s more important than 1,000 small decisions. If you get this right many good things flow, if you don’t see it — disaster. Generally government decision-making spends far too little time on trying to figure out what these big questions are and what the right answer is and far too much on relative trivia — problem-finding remains greatly underrated. And some people have a natural gift for it while others, often with much higher IQ, do not. It’s obviously better to have this talent and be higher IQ but I don’t think the two things are tightly correlated.]
18 May, a return to the issue of air support for the army.
We made no headway at all, and are exactly where we were before. The situation is hopeless and I see no solution besides the provision of an army air arm.
19 May, same issue at COS:
It is a depressing situation and the Air Ministry outlook is now so divorced from the requirements of the army that I see no solution except an Army Air Arm.
More bad news about Auchinleck’s poor taste in people.
On 22/5 AB first met Molotov:
Not very impressive to look at and with slight impediment in his speech, but gave one a feeling of distinct ability and shrewdness.
On 26/5 there was a further meeting with PM, Eden, Attlee et al to sign a treaty:
Somehow the whole affair gave me the creeps and made me feel that humanity has still many centuries to live through before universal peace can be found. (I had evidently not yet become hardened to the insincerity of statements contained in the speeches of politicians and statesman on such occasions!!)
27/5, a return to the issue of organising the command for invasion of France — ‘the desirability or otherwise of a Generalissimo to control all Services, and the necessity of unified command over land, sea and between USA and ourselves’. In response to logistical facts re invasion of France, WSC yet again was ‘inclined to transfer the scene of action to Northern Norway! Which we are now to examine.’
28/5, Eisenhower over for discussions of 1943 invasion. Rommell has attacked as expected.
The Auk [Auchinleck] ought to be able to get the better of it, and has great chances in pushing a counter stroke home.
29/5, a fascinating reference to discussions about coordination of SIS (intelligence) and SOE (sabotage etc):
I still feel they should be under one Ministry and not two as at present.
[NB. Relevant to some deep state readers of this blog. Presumably SIS was under FO, as now, but SOE was under MoD? A classic cross-Whitehall problem. Coordination clearly vital but how best to arrange ministerial/bureaucratic responsibility? It would be madness to allow the current MoD anywhere near such responsibilities today.]
On 31/5 AB helped his wife try out her first bee swarm, he was stung a dozen times and ‘had an uncomfortable week’!
On 12 June he was in Northumberland and was excited to see the birds of the Farne Islands — a beautiful place — but sadly his dinghy overturned and tipped all his cameras into the sea.
He had to make rushed arrangements for going to America with WSC. They got a special train up to Stranraer, he had a long discussion with WSC on what to negotiate with FDR. They got on a Boeing Clipper, ‘huge flying boat beautifully fitted up with bunks to sleep in, dining saloon, stewards, lavatories etc’. They landed on the Potomac after 26.5 hours continuous flight where they were met by Halifax, Dill etc: ‘I found it hard to realise that in one hop I had moved through space from Stranraer Loch to the Potomac.’
AB recounts discussions with the US military re plans for 1942. He worries about what WSC and FDR will cook up when alone. In between meetings, some visits such as to General Lee’s house, kept exactly as it was left when he lived there. He met Stimson for the first time and like most people found him ‘exceptionally charming’ — ‘a fine administrative brain but with a limited strategic outlook’ and another adherent of ‘breaking our heads in too early operations across the Channel’.
On 21 June AB was suddenly called to the White House and had no time to change out of old clothes. He found FDR charming. It turned out as a boy FDR had met his father. During the afternoon meetings came the tragic news of the fall of Tobruk. As WSC and AB were talking to FDR, Marshall came in with the news.
Neither Winston nor I had contemplated such an eventuality and it was a staggering blow. I cannot remember what the individual words were that the President used to convey his sympathy, but I remember vividly being impressed by the tact and real heartfelt sympathy that lay behind these words…
[Discussions of how US could help.]
I always feel that the Tobruk episode in the President’s study did a great deal towards laying the foundations of friendship and understanding built up during the war between the President and Marshall on the one hand and Churchill and myself on the other…
As I was walking out of the President’s room, Hopkins said: ‘Would you care to come round to my room for a few moments’ talk? I could give you some of the background which influenced the President in the statements he has just made and the opinions he has expressed.’ I went with him expecting to be taken to his office. Instead we went to his bedroom where we sat on the edge of his bed looking at his shaving brush and tooth brush, whilst he let me into some of the President’s inner thoughts!
I mention this meeting as it was so typical of this strange man with no official position, not even an office in the White House, and yet one of the most influential men with the President. A man who played a great and nebulous part in the war as the President’s right hand man. A great part that did him all the more credit when his miserable health is taken into account.
A train ride to see an army demonstration — WSC’s butler got hammered. (Interesting that FDR had an airconditioned train then, how widespread was that?) A parachuting display — of 600 men, one broken leg, one sprain, and a fractured skull (0.5% a usual injury rate then?). The butler, recovered, refused to allow WSC outside with his hat brim turned up ludicrously — ‘does not look well, turn it down, turn it down!’ WSC was cross but did! AB concluded the training was not good enough. On 26 June they flew home.
AB felt it had been very valuable. Personal connections were deeper and stronger. They’d discussed core issues. He figured out the Washington scene: the Navy was focused on the Pacific, Marshall was focused on Europe, FDR didn’t grasp the implications of some plans therefore ‘favours plans which are not possible owing to their administrative aspects’. He established close relations with Marshall so they could discuss the errors of their political bosses and how to corral them.
The President had no military knowledge and was aware of this fact and consequently relied on Marshall and listened to Marshall's advice. Marshall never seemed to have any difficulty in countering any wildish plans which the President might put forward. My position was very different. Winston never had the slightest doubt that he had inherited all the military genius from his great ancestor Malborough! His military plans and ideas varied from the most brilliant conceptions at one end to the wildest and most dangerous ideas at the other. To wean him away from these wilder plans required superhuman efforts and was never entirely successful in so far as he tended to return to these ideas again and again. I am convinced that on many occasions Marshall imagined that I was in agreement with some of Winston’s wild ideas; it was not easy for me to explain how matters stood without disloyalty to Winston. On several occasions I believe that Marshall thought that I was double crossing him. It was in this respect, amongst others, that Dill was such an invaluable help. Marshall had the highest respect for him and I was devoted to him, consequently he was in a unique position to reduce difficulties between us. Unfortunately Winston never liked Dill, and had been poisoned against him by Beaverbrook. He consequently never gave him credit for the magnificent part that he played in Washington.
On 30 June, discussions about imminent raid on Dieppe and WSC said he wanted to go the Middle East with AB. AB wanted to go too but ‘not in company of PM at the present juncture with the fate of the Delta and Cairo in the balance’, he tried to dissuade WSC from going then, saying they should give Auchinleck time to stabilise.
1/7, COS, further discussion of the pressure for a western front vs the reality of doing it vastly outnumbered. AB fears they’ll be forced to make preparations for an operation ‘we are convinced is impracticable’.
2/7, considering worst case of Auchinleck failing to stop Rommel’s attack, AB thinking constantly of a trip to Cairo to see the situation for himself. Met Eisenhower.
He certainly made no great impression on me at our first meeting [actually second], and if I had been told then of the future that lay in front of him I should have refused to believe it.
On 3/7, Brendan Bracken asked AB to stop WSC going to Middle East and warned him that Leo Amery’s son was trying to persuade him to go. The son arrived, ‘a most objectionable young pup’, who told WSC in front of AB that he ought to go to Egypt to raise morale. ‘The cheek of the young brute was almost more than I could bear’ and he’d based his deductions on some discussions in the bar of Shepheard’s Hotel, Cairo. AB told WSC to let the situation stabilise before going. Amery had ‘impressed Winston because he had flattered him’.
After he had left the room Winston turned to me and said: ‘That is a wonderful message that young man has brought back for me from the Middle East.’
I replied: ‘Yes, if you are prepared to listen to a bar lounger.’
He then said: ‘A what?’, and I again said ‘A BAR LOUNGER.’
He replied ‘Ah, bar lounger, perhaps.’
I then had a hard time convincing Winston that he had better wait a little longer before going out, my task having been made all the more difficult by young Amery’s chatter.
7/7, Cabinet:
A dreadful exhibition of amateur strategy by Cabinet ministers! Bevin quite at his worst and posing as an authority! Eden and Cripps offering criticism as if they were leading authorities on strategy! PM unfortunately not in his usual form and unable to keep them in order. A most depressing and lamentable meeting.
8/7, another example of WSC attacking the army in Cabinet:
After being thoroughly unpleasant during the Cabinet meeting, with that astounding charm of his he came up to me afterwards and said to me ‘I am sorry Brookie if I had to be unpleasant about Auchinleck and the Middle East!’
The FO constantly enraged AB, one of his constant complaints was their ‘love for de Gaulle’.
WSC again asking — how do we have 750,000 in the Middle East but only 100,000 fighting Rommel. He will ‘never be convinced by the arguments’.
The ration strength versus fighting strength in [Middle East] was always an unpleasant subject. In the middle of a Cabinet meeting he would turn to me and say: ‘Pray explain CIGS, how it is in the [Middle East] 750,000 men always turn up for their pay and rations, but when it comes to fighting only 100,000 turn up! Explain to us now exactly how the remaining 650,000 are occupied.’ Not an easy answer to give in the middle of a Cabinet meeting. He could never understand, or at any rate refused to do so, that the [Middle East] was a vast base for operations in various theatres besides the Western Desert... The figures as put by him looked appalling, but when broken up into details were not over extravagant when modern mechanised requirements are taken into account.
13/7, COS discussed appalling 75% losses on last convoy, a Cabinet, a Defence Committee at 10pm at which WSC again revived the Norway expedition!
He then discussed alternative methods of helping Stalin and again returned to his attack on Norway. Pointing out how easy such an attack would be! Looked like working up to a storm at one time!!
As AB tried to leave, Eden suggested that the person in charge of the Court of Inquiry on Tobruk should ‘cook’ it to exonerate the commander, AB replied that it ‘must report true verdict, this could be kept secret and dealt with by Government as they thought best. This was agreed to.’
Dealing with Washington was tricky as ‘Hopkins is for operating in Africa, Marshall wants to operate in Europe, and King [navy] is determined to strike in the Pacific!’
He picked his moment to suggest to WSC that he go to Middle East alone.
I had by then learned that if you wanted to get Winston’s agreement to something, you might have to wait several days for a propitious moment. To ask at the wrong moment was to court disaster! Once you had received a negative reply it was almost impossible to alter his verdict! I had been waiting for days, very precious days, to ask him to go to the [Middle East] on my own. I knew that the odds would be heavily against getting his sanction, that he would say he could not spare me, whilst in the back of his mind the real reason would be that he would hate me to go off on my own without him. Meanwhile the situation in the Middle East was not improving... It was essential that I should go out to see for myself what was really wrong, and for that job I did not want Winston treading on my heels! Fortunately that lovely evening sitting in the garden of 10 Downing Street I found him in one of his amenable moods. I jumped in at once and to my joy got his approval. The only difficulty was that I could not start at once, as I should have to wait for the arrival of Harry Hopkins’ party, and there was always the danger of Winston changing his mind or deciding to come with me.
(Understanding things like ‘when’s the right time to suggest something’ is crucial to political success. Many of such skills needed for success are not correlated with intelligence.)
Re 1943 and invading France, AB thought it depended on many factors and he resisted the US desire for a fixed plan.
I found Marshall’s rigid form of strategy very difficult to cope with. He never fully appreciated what operations in France would mean – the different standard of training of German divisions as opposed to the raw American divisions and to most of our new divisions. He could not appreciate the fact that the Germans could reinforce the point of attack some 3 to 4 times faster than we could, nor could he understand that until the Mediterranean was open again we should always suffer from the crippling shortage of sea transport.
It was evident that if Russia cracked up the Germans could concentrate the bulk of their forces in France and make an invasion quite impossible. Under those circumstances our only hope would be to operate in Africa. But in any case from the moment I took over the job of CIGS I was convinced that the sequence of events should be:
a) liberate North Africa
b) open up Mediterranean and score a million tons of shipping
c) threaten Southern Europe by eliminating Italy
d) then, and only then, if Russia is still holding, liberate France and invade Germany.
Marshall hankered after direct action in France without appreciating that in the early days such action could only result in the worst of disasters.
Meetings, discussions, late night movies at Chequers. On 20/7 a row over invading France:
… Found both of them [Marshall and King] still hankering after an attack across the Channel this year to take pressure off Russia. They failed to realise that such an action could only lead to the loss of some 6 divisions without achieving any results! Next argument was that we should take advantage of German preoccupation with Russia to establish bridgehead for 1943 operation. Had to convince them that there was no hope of such a bridgehead surviving the winter. Next discussed alternative operations in North Africa which they are not much in favour of preferring the Pacific.
Further unsatisfactory meetings, 11pm the next day back to No10 but then AB not allowed to join Eden and Hopkins with WSC ‘for fear that Marshall and King should hear of it and feel that I had been briefed by Hopkins against them according to President’s wishes!!’ (This is exactly the sort of chaos-mixed-with-fear-of-cabals that is constant around the top of power, incredibly frustrating and time-consuming, almost impossible to stop and extremely hard to suppress.)
Further rows over premature attacks in France but WSC supported AB with Marshall. Cabinet also sided with AB. The next day FDR wired that he accepted 1942 was off and he favoured an attack in North Africa. Got agreement to plan for a North Africa attack if re-entry to Europe impossible in 1943. WSC got AB to present to Cabinet, 24/7:
… From the start things went wrong! Anthony Eden and Cripps thought they saw a flaw in it, they began to argue about things they did not understand, others joined in, and very soon we had one of those situations I have now seen frequently in the Cabinet, where the real issue is completely lost in arguing out some detail which is misquoted and distorted in the discussion. I perspired heavily in my attempts to put things straight and was engaged in heated arguments with Eden and Crips with most of Cabinet taking sides… In the end I triumphed and had the memorandum passed without a word being altered. Any changes would have been fatal, the Americans have gone a long way to meet us, and I should have to ask them for more.
A very trying week, but it is satisfactory to think that we have got just what we wanted out of the USA Chiefs.
On 25/7 there was a farewell dinner at Chequers and a viewing of a new film, The Younger Pitt [is this available somewhere?], and the Americans flew home.
On 28/7 further stormy scenes with WSC over Auchinleck — ‘it is very trying having to fight battles to defend [him] when I am myself doubtful at times why on earth he does not act differently.’
29/7 a chat with WSC in the garden to discuss AB’s impending trip — WSC clearly intent on following shortly. The next day WSC accelerated his timetable. And a wire from Moscow suggesting a WSC visit so WSC thinking about going on there from Middle East with AB. ‘All my plans upset.’ WSC to be disguised on planes to guard against spies. AB left his diary at home in case of crashes.
He hopped to Gibraltar 1/8 then Malta overnight to avoid enemy fighters then to Cairo. Unimpressed with some of Auchinleck’s personnel choices. Discussions with WSC re a replacement for Auchinleck.
Discussion over relative importance of Egypt and Abadan (Iran). The oil supply from Abadan was critical and if lost ‘we inevitably lost Egypt, command of the Indian Ocean, and endangered the whole Indian Burma situation’.
He agreed personnel changes with Auchinleck including Montgomery to take over 8th Army.
… I felt some very serious doubts as to whether an Auk-Monty combination would work. I felt that the Auk would interfere too much with Monty, would ride him on too tight a rein, and would consequently be liable to put him out of his stride. As I was very anxious to put Monty in command of the 8th Army, I thought this might necessitate moving the Auk to some other command.
Conferences with PM and Auchinleck, PM pressing for attack before ready. Long arguments with PM about the personnel changes with PM making unsuitable suggestions without knowing the people.
An interesting remark after a trip through the desert relevant to UKR now — ‘I was impressed by the dispersal which the air forces on the army, with all its evil consequences as regards maintenance and control’.
6/8
One of the most difficult days of my life, with momentous decisions to take as far as my own future and that of the war was concerned.
Whilst I was dressing and practically naked, the PM suddenly burst into my room. Very elated and informed me that his thoughts were taking shape and that he would soon commit himself to paper! I rather shuddered and wondered what he was up to! …
WSC had a scheme for reorganising the command structure — splitting up the Middle East command with the Suez Canal as the boundary.
And he wanted me to take over the Near East Command with Montgomery as my 8th Army Commander! This made my heart race very fast!! He said he did not require an answer at once, and that I could think it over if I wanted. However I told him without waiting I was quite certain that it would be a wrong move. I knew nothing about desert warfare, and could never have time to grab hold of the show to my satisfaction before the necessity to attack became imperative.
Another point which I did not mention was that after working with the PM for close on 9 months I do feel at last that I can exercise a limited amount of control on some of his activities and that at last he is beginning to take my advice. I feel therefore that, tempting as the offer is by accepting it I should definitely be taking a course which would on the whole help the war the least. Finally I could not bear the thought that Auchinleck might think that I had come out here on purpose to work myself into his shoes! PM was not pleased with this reply but accepted it well.
Smuts had a crack at persuading AB later that day (presumably having been asked to by WSC).
WSC wired to the War Cabinet: ME command splitting into Near East and Middle East; Alexander to take Near East, Auchinleck to shift to the new ME; Gott to take over 8th Army (but see below for how history works); various relieved of command.
… it had been one of the most difficult days of my life, and one with devastating heart burnings! I had been offered the finest command I could hope for, and I had turned it down! I could not put the real reasons to Winston which were connected with the fact that, rightly or wrongly, I felt I could exercise some control over him. At any rate, whether I exercised any control or not, I knew by now the dangers to guard against. I had discovered the perils of his impetuous nature. I was now familiar with his method of suddenly arriving at some decision as it were by intuition without any kind of logical examination of the problem. I had, after many failures, discovered the best methods of approaching him. I knew that it would take at least six months for any successor taking over from me to become as familiar as I was with him and his ways. During those six months anything might happen. I would not suggest that I could exercise any real control over him; I never met anybody that could, but he had grown to have confidence in me, and I had found that he was listening more and more to any advice that I gave him…
Looking back I am certain that my decision, hard as it was, was the right one and that by remaining CIGS I was able to render greater services to my country than if I had accepted the more attractive alternative…
I had a very serious misgivings about Gott’s appointment in his tired state, but was not at that time sufficiently convinced of the degree of this disadvantage to oppose the appointment.
The next day news came that Gott had been shot down and killed. AB and Smuts persuaded WSC to appoint Montgomery.
Harriman and others arrived for the Moscow trip, lunch with de Gaulle: ‘as supercilious and self-satisfied as ever’(!).
Re Gott getting shot down (on a route considered so safe that WSC had flown without an escort), he wrote after the war that:
It seemed almost like the hand of God suddenly appearing to set matters right where we had gone wrong. Looking back on those days with the knowledge of what occurred at Alamein and after it I am convinced that the whole course of the war might well have been altered if Gott had been in command of the 8th Army. In his tired condition I do not think that he would have had the energy and vitality to stage and fight this battle as Monty did.
Auchinleck then rejected the offered command. AB thought it would have been more ‘soldierly’ to accept ‘instead of behaving like an offended filmstar’ though he also thought perhaps we are ‘better off without him’. After which PM regaled AB with his theories on organisation:
I again had to give him a long lecture on the system of the chain of command in the Army! I fear that it did not sink much deeper in that it has before!
On 9/8 he had to wangle a pre-meeting with Alexander before latter spoke to Churchill. This is a good example of the sort of incident practically all of which are lost to history but can be critical — the quick ‘A thinks B, if you say C it will confirm him in B, the way to finesse it is tell him D and if he says F say G’ discussion in a corridor to ‘fix’ the meeting (G39 and the little waiting room in No10 are used for this now).
11/8, hopped to Tehran. He describes ‘a delightful spot in the hills where the Legation staff live’ with lovely cool trees and a stream, a garden, a pond with fish, ‘a real paradise’ — the area originally given to Queen Victoria. (Is it still part of the British Embassy?)
AB’s plane then developed a serious problem and WSC disappeared to Moscow without him. AB arrived Moscow on 13/8, on the way stopping at Kuibyshev airfield — now Samara. (It’s funny to think of AB in the war landing at that airfield I saw 50 years later when trying to get an airline going in Samara, the city with by far the highest ratio of beautiful women in the world, according to local legend because of a permanent change in the gene pool because of wartime shifts of people. Under the city is a vast bunker complex built by Stalin with slave labour in case he had to evacuate from Moscow. The office built for Stalin far beneath the ground, which I’ve stood in, has fake wooden corner walls so NKVD men could hide there and, at a signal from the monster, leap out ‘from the walls’ to drag the poor victim from their seat. Stalin apparently had the slave workforce killed to preserve its secrets, in the manner of some Pharaohs. When I was there in 1995-6 a small bribe got you a guided tour. AB writes about seeing ‘all the construction’ flying over Kuibyshev, ‘everywhere new works were springing out of the ground’. It became a great centre for defence and aerospace in the Soviet Union and was one of the ‘closed cities’ that disappeared from maps and tourism until it suddenly opened in 1991. When I arrived, they had been cut off from almost all contact with the world for decades.)
He met Stalin:
It was very interesting meeting him, and I was much impressed by his astuteness, and his crafty cleverness. He is a realist, with little flattery about him, and not looking for much flattery either… Stalin is a realist if ever there was one, facts only count with him, plans, hypotheses, future possibilities mean little to him, but he is ready to face facts even when unpleasant. Winston, on the other hand, never seems anxious to face an unpleasantness until forced to do so. He appealed to sentiments in Stalin which I do not think exist there. Altogether I felt we were not gaining much ground, and were being accused of breaking our word, lack of courage to open a Second Front, incapable of realising the importance of the Russian front, only giving them the equipment which we did not want, etc etc.
Personally I feel our policy with the Russians has been wrong from the very start, and as begun by Beaverbrook. We have bowed and scraped to them, done all we could for them and never asked them for a single fact or figure concerning their production, strength, dispositions etc. As a result they despise us and have no use for us except for what they can get out of us.
On 14/8 there was a banquet in the Kremlin with massive amounts of vodka. AB felt bored and sick at the scene, and filled his vodka glass with water unobserved. The repulsive Voroshilov started downing shots of chilli vodka, broke out in a sweat ‘and took little further interest in proceedings’. Years later when he shut his eyes AB could recall a repulsive suckling pig that seemed to stare at him with a smile.
[Stalin] is an outstanding man, that there is no doubt about, but not an attractive one. He’s got an unpleasantly cold, crafty, dead face, and whenever I look at him I can imagine him sending off people to their doom without ever turning a hair. On the other hand there is no doubt that he has a quick brain and a real grasp of the essentials of war. He strikes me as ageing and beginning to show distinct signs of wear…
There is no doubt that they are anxious to get all they can out of us, but at the same time have no intention of giving us the smallest help of any kind. They are an astonishingly suspicious type of people and very difficult to arrive at that close cooperation in war which is essential... We have never really got down to discuss the main problems of this war or how we can best circumvent our common difficulties.
While in Moscow AB was told by a Pole that he thought Stalin had sent a large consignment of Polish prisoners to the Gulag or murdered them all. It was true. This was the notorious Katyn massacre ordered by Stalin where the NKVD executed thousands of Poles. When the Nazis revealed it in 1943, Stalin blamed the Nazis and this lie was endorsed across the west.
AB could not get straight answers on the defence of the Caucasus. Voroshilov spouted lies.
Thank heaven, amongst has many mistakes, Hitler lost a golden opportunity by carrying on with the desperate attacks against Stalingrad instead of directing Von Paulus towards Persia and the Middle East oil. Instead of losing this army of 60,000 men captured by the Russians he would have found the road leading to one of the greatest strategic prizes practically open and devoid of defences.
Our visit to Moscow had now come to an end. It had been of intense interest and looking back on it I feel that it fulfilled a very useful purpose, that of creating the beginnings of a strange understanding between Winston and Stalin.
On 16/8 WSC had a last meeting with Stalin that lasted from 7pm to 3am after which he went to the airport and they all flew back to Iran where they again had dinner at the paradise in the hills.
At this meeting, WSC asked Stalin why he’d done the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Stalin replied that he knew of Britain’s military weakness and assumed we understood the pitiful state of France, therefore he could not imagine us actually fighting, so he did the deal to buy himself time. (Anybody know if other documents back up this account of Stalin’s reasoning and this is now the consensus ‘truth’? Another reminder viz UKR now of how hard it is to have confidence in one’s reasoning about the motives of foreign leaders…)
Stalin asked WSC why Britain had bombed Molotov in Berlin, WSC replied that such opportunities should not be neglected.
Stalin then said that Molotov was engaged in conversation with Ribbentrop who was saying that the British Empire was now finished and that the time had come to work out the partition of those lands between Germany and Russia. At this moment the bombers arrived and Ribbentrop decided to continue the discussion in the dug out. When safely established underground Ribbentrop continued saying that as he had already mentioned the British Empire need no longer be taken account of. Molotov interrupted at this point with the awkward question: ‘Then why are we down here now?’ This had pleased Stalin very much and he told Winston that his Molotov had a good sense of humour.
They then hopped back to Cairo, further discussions on how to organise defence of Middle East and Persian oil. Bletchley intercepts showed impending Rommel attack, AB had to tell WSC bluntly he could not stay to watch or would be accused of interfering etc. On 19/8 news of the Dieppe raid (disaster) but AB says nothing about it. Serious worries over a German push into Caucasus and the vulnerability of Iraq-Persia and oil supplies.
23/8, preparations for secret departure, he thinks back over past 3 weeks:
Stalin, a crafty, brilliant, realistic mind, devoid of any sense of human pity or kindness. Gives one almost an uncanny feeling to be in his presence. But undoubtedly a big and shrewd brain with clear cut views as to what he wants and expects to get.
The most important part of the trip he considered to be the reorganisation of the ME command and restoring morale of the troops there. Back to London, 24/8. Discussions about UK-US operations in North Africa.
31/8, news that Rommel’s expected attack had begun.
1/9 AB has many people telling him of the problems and dangers of landing in North Africa:
It is very hard to maintain one’s determination to carry out an operation when everybody keeps pouring into one’s ear all the awful dangers one is likely to meet. It takes far more moral courage than anyone would believe to stick to one’s plan and to refuse to be diverted.
(And of course it’s a priori unknowable whether one is ‘rightly sticking to the plan showing the proper determination/courage’ or ‘crazily sticking to the plan despite it being clearly doomed’.)
AB gets an account of the Dieppe raid, 2.7k of 5k lost, but doesn’t explain why it was undertaken or what he thought of the logic.
2/9 half the day wasted hanging around to discuss FDR’s wire:
This day is a good example of the way Winston’s impetuosity was apt to delay matters and waste one’s time. If only he had given us time to consider this wire before meeting him we should not have wasted half the morning, nor would his time and that of [ministers] been wasted… Unfortunately he always wished to stick his fingers into a pie before it was cooked!
(This is a constant feature of dealing with MPs. Because of how they think and work large numbers of people are constantly hanging around waiting for meetings because someone has said ‘the minister/PM wants to discuss…’ and nobody can grip them to say ‘no meeting now, let XY and Z discuss this first then we’ll have a meeting if we need one’. Boris was constantly irritated by me not obeying his orders when he said ‘get X here now’ because I was trying to minimise this waste of time. His view was that the most important ingredient in any decision was him talking and this led to extraordinary amounts of time wasted.)
9/9 Sikorski told AB that Germans would be satisfied with capture of Stalingrad and Grozny in 1942 and would focus on developing Ukraine, not going on to Baku and the oil.
He refers to Duncan Sandys, WSC’s son-in-law and Financial Secretary, trying to push out PJ Grigg as Secretary of State for War. Grigg was a tough taskmaster and much approved of by AB who did not trust Sandys. Grigg told AB on 7/9 that he thought Sandys was trying to force him out. On 9/9 WSC brought the issue up with AB and said he didn’t think Grigg was allowing Sandys ‘enough scope’. AB doesn’t give details of their discussion but after the war he wrote:
Of the two there was no comparison. P.J had ten times the ability, but what was infinitely more important he was just as straight as they make them. Had Sandys succeeded in replacing him I should have had no alternative but to resign.
On such apparently small things the fate of millions depends! (Such incidents, deep in the deep state, are often 100X more important than the ‘policy disagreements’ of ministers on which the political media focuses.)
On 19/9 he had a brief leave to go shooting, somewhere 15 miles from Catterick. WSC called up and pestered him about telegrams which he hadn’t seen, prompting irritation on both sides.
It was very typical of him, he hated letting me go off without continually calling up for one reason or another to find out whether one still remained accessible. My Sundays at home were always subjected to a series of calls throughout the day.
He returned to find WSC again pushing for a Norway operation and badgering Alexander, which AB warned would suggest to Alexander that WSC had lost confidence in him ‘which was a most disconcerting thing before a battle’.
He then started all his worst arguments about generals only thinking of themselves and their reputations, and never attacking unless matters were a certainty, and never prepared to take risks etc etc. He said this delay would result in Rommel fortifying a belt 20 miles deep by 40 miles broad that we should never break through owing to a series of Maginot defences etc etc! I had a very unpleasant ¾ hour!..
[After dinner sent for again]
We had a hammer and tongs argument which ended on friendly terms.
On 24/9 WSC had a long diatribe about how nobody supported him, everybody just criticised his ideas etc.
Frequently in this oration he worked himself up into such a state from the woeful picture he had painted, that tears streamed down his face! It was very difficult on those occasions not to be filled with sympathy for him when one realised the colossal burden he was bearing and the weight of responsibility he shouldered. On the other hand if we had not checked some of his wild ideas, heaven knows where we should be now!
On 30/9 officials from MI5 came to AB. A hidden microphone had captured a discussion between Kenneth de Courcy and Raikes. De Courcy was founder of the Imperial Policy Group, was close to Edward VIII and (from Wikipedia) seems a highly dodgy character — exactly the type MI5 should have been spying on. The discussion showed much of the details of the North African operation had leaked somehow. MI5 did not dare show the discussion to Duff Cooper, their ministerial boss —
… as they were uncertain how much he knew about this plan of attack. I discussed it with Pug Ismay and decided it was safe for Duff Cooper to see, but that he should let PM see the conversation.
That evening he arrived at No10 to find the PM calling the BBC to order them to cut De Gaulle off instantly if he deviated from the agreed script! (Interesting this was a PM call — I assume he was not the only person with the authority to issue such orders to the BBC?)
On 1/10 AB found WSC in bed discussing the de Courcy intercept with Cooper. To AB’s horror Cooper suggested that the information had leaked from one of AB’s staff and WSC asked AB to look into it ASAP. AB absolved the suspect after personal discussion that afternoon so the inquiry was left to Cooper to continue. (They identified someone from SOE as the culprit a few days later.)
In October a main focus was the forthcoming North African landings, Operation TORCH. AB got his way (focus on clearing Germans out of North Africa) and FDR got US troops fighting.
Montgomery’s plan for attack was finalised. AB had a very difficult judgement regarding how much and when to tell WSC.
14/10:
As I had no confidence in Winston’s ability to keep anything secret I decided not to tell him about this plan. I knew, however, that I should have difficulties as Winston was continually fretting to advance the date and asking me why we were not being informed of the proposed date of attack. I had to judge between the relative importance of maintaining complete secrecy and on the other hand of stopping Winston from wiring to Alex and Monty and upsetting their plans with his impatience.
On 16/10 WSC was in great form and AB took the risk of telling him about the plans for the attack while stressing the absolute importance of him not blabbing it to anybody.
On 22/10 a ‘hammer and tongs’ argument between AB and Portal at COS. The RAF and Air Ministry wanted the main focus to be massive bombing which they thought could beat Germany without a need for costly invasion. AB: this is unrealistic and the RAF should focus more on supporting ground operations.
Then he saw WSC who had promised not to tell anybody then admitted he’d blabbed the secrets to Eisenhower and Bedell Smith:
I rubbed his iniquity into him and he was very nice and repentant and said he would send for Eisenhower at once to impress necessity for secrecy on him. I then came back to [the War Office] to find that PJ Grigg, the only other person I had told about it, had also gone and told [Deputy Director of Military Intelligence] and the Director of Public Relations!! It is absolutely fatal to tell any politician any secret, they are incapable of keeping it to themselves…
The newspaper reporter in him was coming to the fore. News was not somethign to sit on, it must be cashed in at once, even if that cash only meant importance. He had no reason whatever to tell Eisenhower, this attack did not concern him in the least at that moment, and what is more important, Ike’s HQ was conspicuously leaky as regards information and secrets at that time.
On 23/10 Montgomery’s attack kicked off. AB recounted how he had been ‘inwardly eaten up with anxiety’ as to the results.
The very fact that these feelings had to be kept entirely to myself had made them all the harder to bear… So much depended on it all, and I had such deep hopes of success, that I wondered how I should face failure should this be necessary.
On 29/10 Eden went to WSC and told him the attack was faltering. AB was infuriated. He was summoned by WSC and ‘had to tell him fairly plainly what I thought of Anthony Eden’s ability to judge a tactical situation at this distance’. At COS, Eden repeated his view. Fortunately Smuts was very helpful in supporting AB. Late at night he had to go back to No10:
He had specially good intercept he wanted me to see and was specially nice. Referring to Middle East, he said, ‘Would you not like to have accepted the offer of Command I made to you, and be out there now?’ I said, ‘Yes’ and meant it. And he said, ‘Smuts told me your reasons, and that you thought you could serve your country best by remaining with me, and I am very grateful for this decision.’ This forged one more link between him and me! He is the most difficult man I have ever served with, but thank God for having given me the opportunity of trying to serve such a man in a crisis such as the one this country is going through at present.
When I went to see Winston, having been sent for from the COS meeting, I was met by a flow of abuse of Monty. What was my Monty doing now, allowing the battle to peter out (Monty was always my Monty when he was out of favour!). [Underlined ‘my’ in original] He had done nothing now for the last three days, and now he was withdrawing troops from the front. Why had he told us he would be through in seven days if all he intended to do was to fight a half hearted battle? Had we not got a single general who could even win one single battle? etc etc. When when he stopped to regain his breath I asked him what had suddenly influenced him to arrive at these conclusions. He said that Anthony Eden had been with him last night and that he was very worried with the course the battle was taking, and that neither Monty nor Alex was gripping the situation and showing a true offensive spirit. The strain of the battle had had its effect on me, the anxiety was growing more and more intense each day and my temper was on edge. I felt very angry with Eden and asked Winston why he consulted his Foreign Secretary when he wanted advice on strategic and tactical matters. He flared up and asked whether he was not entitled to consult whoever he wished! To which I replied he certainly could, provided he did not let those who knew little about military matters upset his equilibrium. He continued by stating that he was dissatisfied with the course of the battle and would hold a COS meeting under his Chairmanship at 12.30 to be attended by some of his colleagues.
At this meeting Eden put his view. AB replied and explained that Rommel had been counterattacking; delays were inevitable as Monty advanced and reformed new reserves. Smuts again supported AB.
… The temperamental film-stars returned to their tasks — peace reigned in the dove cot!
Personally however I was far from being at peace. I had my own doubts and my own anxieties as to the course of events, but these had to be kept entirely to myself. On returning to my office I paced up and down, suffering from a desperate feeling of loneliness. I had, during that morning’s discussion, tried to maintain an exterior of complete confidence. It had worked, confidence had been restored. I then told them what I thought Monty must be doing, and I knew Monty well, but there was still just the possibility that I was wrong and that Monty was beat. The loneliness of those moments of anxiety, when there is no one one can turn to, have to be lived through to realise their intense bitterness. [One of the most memorable passages so far. It’s extremely rare in history to have contemporary references by senior people to their doubts at a critical moment. Now the tale of Alamein seems an inevitable episode in a story with a known ending and we easily forget what it was like to live through. I think of my own grandparents, 3/4 of whom were in the North Africa desert then.]
On 3/11 AB was given intercepts from Rommel to Hitler in which he stated he faced ‘desperate defeat from which he could extract only remnants’. The next day Hitler told Rommel to hold on and his army had to choose between ‘death and victory’. WSC also saw these intercepts and was understandably thrilled, asking AB about ringing the church bells. AB understandably wanted to wait until they were absolutely sure it could not backfire. The victory at El Alamein would also make it easier for TORCH.
Great news poured in. Then on 8/11 the landings started at Casablanca, Oran, Algiers etc. On 9/11 WSC congratulated AB at Cabinet.
I think this is the only occasion on which he expressed publicly any appreciation or thanks for work I had done during the whole of the period I worked for him. [!!!]
The next day WSC gave his famous speech — ‘… it is certainly the end of the beginning’.
AB thought Eisenhower was making slow progress. He had ‘never even commanded a battalion in action’ before leading this attack in Africa.
No wonder he was at a loss as to what to do, and allowed himself to be absorbed in the political situation at the expense of the tactical. I had little confidence in his having the ability to handle the military situation confronting him, and he caused me great anxiety.
By 30/11 WSC was again pushing for a plan to invade Europe in 1943 while also suggesting manpower cuts.
He never faces realities, at one moment we are reducing our forces, and the next we are invading the Continent with vast armies for which there is no hope of finding the shipping. He is quite incorrigible and I am quite exhausted!
It was a year since AB had started as CIGS:
Age or exhaustion will force me to relinquish the job before another year is finished. It has been quite the hardest year of my life, but a wonderful one in some ways to have lived through! I had only been in the saddle one week when Japan came into the war, and by the end of the third week I thought I was finished and that I could never compete with the job! Then disaster followed disaster and politicians under those circumstances are never easy people to handle. At times life was most unpleasant. The PM was desperately trying at times but with his wonderful qualities it is easy to forgive him all. A hard task master, and the most difficult man to serve that I have ever met, but it is worth all these difficulties to have the privilege to work with such a man. And now, at last the tide has begun to turn a little, probably only a temporary lull and many more troubles may be in store. But the recent successes have had a most heartening effect and I start a new year with great hopes for the future.
On 3/12 WSC revived again the issue of invading Germany. WSC said that they’d promised Stalin in Moscow:
To which I replied, ‘No, we did not promise!’ He then stopped and stared at me for a few seconds, during which I think he remembered that if any promise was made it was during that last evening when he went to say goodbye to Stalin, and when I was not there! He said no more…
On 9/12 our Ambassador in Moscow talked with AB.
He corroborates all my worst fears, namely that we are going to have great difficulties in getting out of Winston’s promise to Stalin, namely the establishment of a western front in 1943! Stalin seems to be banking on it, and Clark Kerr fears a possible peace between Hitler and Stalin if we disappoint the latter. Personally I cannot see such a settlement. Stalin is just beginning to get the better of the Boche and would only accept a settlement entailing restoration of all frontiers plus Baltic states, plus share of Balkans, plus many guarantees for the future which Germany cannot give. On the German side, Germany cannot carry on without grain from Ukraine and oil from Caucasus plus oil from Rumania. I therefore feel that the danger of a peace between Russia and Germany is mainly useful propaganda from either side to secure their own ends.
On 10/12 COS discussed the idea of building ships out of ice. (I was told by an MoD official years ago a story I only dimly remember of someone explaining it to WSC by dropping ice in his bath tub while he was in it. I guess this must be in someone’s memoirs? From memory it isn’t as mad as it sounds!?)
15/12 focused on rejecting WSC desire for western front and instead focus in Mediterranean to push ‘Italy out of the war and Turkey into it’ thereby most effectively relieving pressure on Russia. Interesting comment that airmen, ‘disconnected with the administrative problems of supply’, often criticised the army for being too slow and were now doing this viz Monty.
On 16/12 progress persuading WSC on 1943 strategy, ‘but I have still the Americans to convince first, and then Stalin next’.
18/12 interesting comment: he had to tell someone they were ‘too old for the job’:
… he took it very well, but the sort of interview that makes me almost sick before starting them.
(As I stress ad nauseam, the core of extreme performance is fighting the natural entropy of duffers accumulating in large organisations. Basic to why this entropy exists is that non-psychopaths do not enjoy these conversations and will avoid them unless incentives and culture are unusual. AB was very tough and good at his job but it’s interesting he admits this. The civil service has rotted at senior levels because of this exact problem — duffers promoted far beyond their abilities, not removed regardless of disasters, the best people leave etc — and the entire system spends huge amounts of effort to stop anybody taking responsibility and having such discussions, or even discussing this issue sensibly. The HR rot is so extreme that the Cabinet Office now often gives up removing even criminals.)
On 22/12 a message came from FDR re meeting in Casablanca in January.
23/12 a bad plan from Eisenhower on invading Sardinia. AB critical of Mountbatten’s staff and gave the problem to his Joint Planners.
After an afternoon meeting with WSC on Christmas Eve he managed to get home, returned to work on 28/12. Focus: how to get America to agree on strategy? Delays from Eisenhower:
I am afraid that Eisenhower as a general is hopeless! He submerges himself in politics and neglects his military duties, partly, I am afraid, because he knows little if anything about military matters. I don't like the situation in Tunisia at all!
These remarks about Eisenhower are pretty drastic! My opinion, however, never changed much as regards his tactical ability or his powers of command. In his early days he literally knew nothing of the requirements of a commander in action… Where he shone was in his ability to handle allied forces, to treat them all with strict impartiality, and to get the very best out of an inter-allied force… As Supreme Commander, what he may have lacked in military ability he greatly made up for by the charm of his personality.
On New Year’s Eve, one problem after another with personnel, Eisenhower, telling someone they’d ‘reached their ceiling’, Malta, supplying forces in North Africa… ‘This is a dog’s life!’
1943
1/1
New year started. I cannot help glancing back at Jan 1 last year when I could see nothing but calamities ahead… Horrible doubts, horrible nightmares, which grew larger and larger as the days went on till it felt as if the whole Empire was collapsing round my head. Wherever I looked I could see nothing but trouble. Middle East began to crumble, Egypt was threatened. I felt Russia could never hold, Caucasus was bound to be penetrated, and Abadan (our Achilles Heel) [the oil] would be captured with the consequent collapse of Middle East, India, etc.
After Russia’s defeat how were we to handle the German land and air forces liberated? England would be again bombarded, threat of invasion revived. Throughout it all Cabinet Ministers’ nerves would be more and more on edge and clear thinking would become more and more difficult.
And now! We start 1943 under conditions I would never have dared to hope. Russia has held, Egypt for the present is safe. There is a hope of clearing North Africa of Germans in the near future. The Mediterranean may be partially opened. Malta is safe for the present. We can now work freely against Italy, and Russia is scoring wonderful successes in southern Russia. We are certain to have many setbacks to face, many troubles, and many shattered hopes, but for all that the horizon is infinitely brighter.
From a personal point of view life is also easier. With 13 months of this job behind me I feel just a little more confident than I did in those awful early days when I felt completely lost and out of place.
AB wanted to get out to Africa and see what Eisenhower was doing. Ike’s deputy was behaving appallingly and Ike demoted him: ‘with his high quality of impartiality…Through this action Ike greatly rose in my estimation.’
6/1
A very trying COS, arguing about landing craft figures produced by Mountbatten and Dudley Pound. The former was, as usual, confused in his figures and facts and the latter was, as usual, asleep! Chairmanship of the meeting was consequently difficult!!
8/2
One of those awful COS meetings where Mountbatten and Dudley Pound drive me completely to desperation. The former is quite irresponsible, suffers from the most desperate illogical brain, always producing red herrings, the latter is asleep 90% of the time the remaining 10% is none too sure what he is arguing about.
[Let this be a reminder that however desperate and fateful the news you’re watching on TV may be, and you hope ‘at least the top people will be on it’, those responsible for keeping you alive may well be in meetings just like this. This is what covid was like.]
On 12/1 they left for Casablanca.
AB wanted Sicily to be the next target, Joint Planners preferred Sardinia.
14/1 AB opened the first big meeting with the American Chiefs of Staff with an hour long presentation on the situation and proposed action. Marshall followed explaining disagreements. After a day of meetings AB went to the beach to look at birds then back to find an invitation for dinner with FDR who had arrived. King got drunk and WSC didn’t realise, an alarm went off and they sat with candles.
Explaining the best path viz Mediterranean strategy versus French landings ‘is a slow and tiring business’, they can’t be pushed ‘and must be made gradually to assimilate our proposed policy’. He met Patton, ‘a real fire-eater and a definite character’.
The whole process was made all the more difficult by the fact that amongst Marshall’s very high qualities he did not possess those of a strategist. It was almost impossible to make him grasp the true concept of a strategic situation. He was unable to argue out a strategic situation and preferred to hedge and defer decisions until such time as he had to consult his assistants. Unfortunately his assistants were not of the required calibre…
My meeting with Patton had been of great interest. I had already heard of him but must confess that his swashbuckling personality exceeded my expectation. I did not form any high opinion of him, nor had I any reason to alter this view at a later date. A dashing, courageous, wild and unbalanced leader, good for operations requiring thrust and push but at a loss in any operation requiring skill and judgement.
On 17/1 AB horrified to be told that the US Joint Planners did not agree with Germany being the primary enemy and wanted to focus on Japan! On 18/1 a chaotic day with drafts of documents and multiple meetings by the end of which AB succeeded in persuading Marshall and having a joint approach presented to FDR and WSC. After the war AB noted that the breakthrough was mainly to the credit of Dill who helped figure out how to persuade Marshall then went to Marshall himself (a classic example of the pre-meeting being the critical meeting!). Dill also stressed to AB that they had to sort it out and could not let it go to FDR and WSC — ‘You know as well as I do what a mess they would make of it’!
AB wonderfully summarised the state of North Africa:
A [commander-in-chief] deficient of experience and of limited ability in the shape of Eisenhower, and three possible French leaders, Darlan who had ability but no integrity, Giraud who had charm but no ability, and de Gaulle who had the mentality of a dictator combined with a most objectionable personality!
WSC wanted to see FDR off then have two days rest and painting in Marrakesh, which AB approved of. AB made plans to see the Atlas mountains and do some partridge shooting with a local sheikh. Sadly the plans were disrupted.
After meetings on 20/1, he concluded the work was mostly done:
It has been one of the most difficult tasks I have had to do, and at one time I began to despair of arriving at any sort of agreement. Now we have got practically all we hoped to get when we came here! They are difficult though charming people to work with. Marshall has got practically no strategic vision, his thoughts revolve round the creation of forces and not on their employment. He arrived here without a single real strategic concept, he has initiated nothing in the policy for the future conduct of the war. His part has been that of somewhat clumsy criticism of the plans we put forward… But as a team to have to discuss with they are friendliness itself, and although our discussions have become somewhat heated at times, yet our relations have never been strained. I hope we shall leave here with a more closely united outlook on the war.
They’d agreed on the organisation of Higher Command in North Africa. Centralised command was needed to coordinate across the First and Eighth Armies and US and French forces. They brought Alexander from the Middle East and appointed him deputy to Eisenhower — i.e placing a senior and experienced commander under the US commander without experience.
Such a plan was consequently quite acceptable to them, and they did not at the time fully appreciate the underlying intentions. We were pushing Eisenhower up into the stratosphere and rarefied atmosphere of a Supreme Commander, where he would be free to devote his time to the political and inter-allied problems, whilst we inserted under him one of our own commanders to deal with the military situations and to restore the necessary drive and coordination which had been so seriously lacking of late!…
My estimate of the American Chiefs of Staff as written on our first Combined Meetings were remarkably accurate, and I have never had much cause to depart from these first impressions throughout the many subsequent meetings that we had.
(Very interesting! A great example of a) how critical understanding of true power in bureaucracies really is, b) how rare such understanding is. I wonder if Hopkins was involved in these discussions and understood what was happening?)
On 21/2 further discussions of Sicily vs Sardinia, with opinion hardening against AB.
When an operation has finally been completed it all looks so easy, but so few people ever realise the infinite difficulties of maintaining an object or a plan and refusing to be driven off it by other people for a thousand good reasons! A good plan pressed through is better than many ideal ones which are continually changing. Advice without responsibility is easy to give.
This is the most exhausting job, trying to keep the ship of war on a straight course despite all the country wins that blow is a superhuman job!
AB had won the argument on Sicily before going to Casablanca but then had to convince Marshall. After doing so the Joint Planners suddenly ‘reappeared on the scene’ lobbying for Sardinia again with Mountbatten supportive. There was a three hour battle and AB told them that ‘I flatly refused’ to go back to the Americans and say that we’d changed our minds and now wanted to invade Sardinia, which would ‘irrevocably shake their confidence in our judgement’.
AB’s basic goals: 1) keep Germany defined as the main/first enemy to be beaten; 2) get agreement that the best way to attack Germany was via the Mediterranean; 3) Sicily is the next step. Pulling it off was ‘quite the hardest 10 days I have had from the point of view of difficulty of handling the work’. On 23rd the work was finished and signed off by FDR and WSC.
The meeting had drawn us far closer together, but we were soon to discover that as soon as we parted we began to drift away from each other, and misunderstandings grew up between us. We found that it was essential to have frequent Combined Chiefs of Staff meetings to regain our common understanding.
The meeting broke up. Instead of partridge shooting, on 24/1 WSC summoned AB to his bedroom in Marrakesh, surrounded by exotic ornaments, religious lights, blue silk and WSC in his green, red and gold dragon dressing gown smoking a cigar. WSC painted for a couple of hours then they were off to Cairo (interesting that WSC felt the need to get Cabinet agreement to his travel schedule, another reminder of how much less of a dictator WSC was (in some ways) than Blair or Boris who would never have thought of asking the Cabinet for permission). When they arrived on 26/1, WSC sank a glass of cold white wine in one one go and they went off to meetings.
On 28/1 AB landed at Siwah Oasis, ‘a most interesting spot’. They looked at a temple which had been revealed when a storm washed away some houses and was ‘considered to be that of the famous oracle’ which Alexander the Great visited.
(The Siwah Oracle happens to be the photo in the icon for this blog, taken when I visited a decade ago. Funny how on his travels AB happened to stop at two odd spots, Samara and Siwah, which I’ve been to!? I drove with my wife from Marsa Matruh through the desert with Bach’s violin concertos the perfect soundtrack. This photo is taken at the front of the temple, I’m in the far distance with my back to the oracle wall — the priest apparently hid in a cavity in a false wall behind the wall my back is against. Alexander the Great said that the oracle had told him that he, the son of Zeus, would conquer the world. I highly recommend visiting. When I was there there were no controls, you could just wander around the oracle/temple like you could the Acropolis 200 years ago. I had absolutely no sense of a revolutionary feeling in the country but a few weeks after I left the revolution broke out.)
On 30/1 they flew to Turkey having borrowed clothes from friends and looking a sight. AB was very concerned on their arrival that security had been blown, many people knew WSC was there, Germans weren’t far away, and physical security for their meetings was hopeless. (Interesting he records a discussion with an ‘insolent’ detective responsible for WSC’s security.) He and WSC had some meetings and returned to Cairo. WSC had wanted to change plans and stay.
[WSC] loved these sudden changes of plans. Unfortunately he often wished to carry out similar sudden changes in strategy! I had the greatest difficulty in making him realise strategy was a long term process in which you could not frequently change your mind. He did not like being reminded of this fact and frequently shook his fist in my face and said, ‘I do not want any of your long term projects, all they do is cripple initiative.’ I agreed that it might possibly cripple initiative but all I wanted was to know when he would put his left foot down after having put down his right, and that I refused to look upon that as a ‘long term project’.
Hopes of getting Turkey into the war failed. Von Pappen tricked Turkey into thinking there were big German forces in Bulgaria which kept them on the fence.
On to Tripoli where they saw Monty and his army. As the soldiers paraded past, a tear ran down AB’s face and he turned to WSC and saw tears. It was partly the change of ‘raw pink bodies’ to ‘bronzed war-hewn countenances’, a striking tangible sign of the turn of the tide. AB felt intensely the shift from the extreme gloom of early 1942 to the fresh hopes of victory and the huge relief.
There were warnings not to go to Algiers because of dangers to WSC but they went. Then home by 7/2. NB. At the end of January the German army in Stalingrad finally collapsed after Hitler’s insane orders contributed to the German disaster.
Planning for Sicily invasion. Pressure from WSC and FDR to do it in June but they have to clear Germans out of Tunisia first. Eisenhower was stalled on dealing with this. (24/2 makes a reference to midday exercise in St James’ Park, suggests he often went there for a walk and to look at the birds. Bumped into Hore-Belisha ‘looking more greasy and objectionable than ever’!)
25/2 AB refers to America backtracking on Casablanca agreements and sending US divisions to UK. Shipping problems mounting.
14/3 caught flu, no entries 15-23/3 (looked after by his wife who then caught it). Returned to continued problems viz Sicily plans and discussions on organising a command for re-entry into Europe. On 26/3 he was summoned to WSC who emerged from his bath to dress in silk underwear ‘looking rather like Humpty Dumpty’. As he dressed he ‘rippled on the whole time about Monty’s battle and our proposed visit to North Africa’, adding that AB looked tired and should have a long weekend.
29/3, dinner with WSC in the No10 drawing room [which room is this now?]:
Dinner consisted of plover’s eggs, chicken broth, chicken pie, chocolate soufflé and with it a bottle of champagne between us, port and brandy! We discussed the organisation of Europe after the war, his disapproval of Roosevelt’s plan to build up China whilst neglecting France etc. But the main subject was his disappointment about Eisenhower, and plans for our next trip to North Africa. At 10:30 pm we went to a meeting with the Joint Planners to listen to an account of the proposed plan for the capture of Sicily. He took it fairly well but as usual considered we were using for too much strength and that we ought to be capturing both southern Italy and Greece at the same time.
15/4:
A depressing COS as recent telegrams from America show that we are just about back where we were before Casablanca! Their hearts are really in the Pacific, we are trying to run two wars at once which is quite impossible with limited resources of shipping. All we can hope for is to go all out to defeat Italy and thus produce the greatest dispersal of German forces and make the going easier for the Russians. If we even knew what the Russians hoped to do!! But we have no inkling.
On 17/4 WSC was delighted to get a telegram from Marshall suggesting the Sicily attack before Tunisia cleared. ‘Quite mad and quite impossible’.
AB thought German strategy in 1943 would focus on ‘maximum offensive against our shipping at sea and defensive on land and in the air on all other fronts’.
3/5, Defence Committee to discuss tank production and armament:
A complete Alice in Wonderland meeting. Clark D of A [Armour] expressing the usual technician opinion entirely detached from tactical and operational requirements. Duncan Sandys expressing a self-opinionated amateur’s view devoid of all sound basis. Lord Cherwell wandering off into impossibilities etc etc.
5/5 off to Washington with WSC, Chiefs of Staff, Joint Planners plus shipping, intelligence etc staff. This time by ship. They were shown which lifeboat to use in the event of a sub sinking them. Discussed the shipping situation: most of the US Navy was in the Pacific and ‘larger land and air forces have gone to this theatre than to Europe in spite of all we have said about the necessity of defeating Germany first’. Had to deal with WSC offending people:
Running a war seems to consist in making plans and then ensuring that all those destined to carry it out don’t quarrel with each other instead of the enemy.
(In politics too! One’s main problems is keeping people aligned with the strategy and minimising chimp politics between them.)
10/5 a bad meeting with WSC:
A thoroughly unsatisfactory meeting at which he again showed that he cannot grasp the relation of various theatres of war to each other. He always gets carried away by the one he is examining and in prosecuting it is prepared to sacrifice most of the others. I have never in the 1½ years that I have worked with him succeeded in making him review the war as a whole and to relate the importance of the various fronts to each other.
NB. Bismarck on his actions in the Schleswig-Holstein affair:
The individual actions were trifles in themselves; to see that they connected was the difficulty.
Discussions on the Mediterranean strategy was soon diverted again to pet projects in Sumatra or Penang.
AB foresees the pattern in Washington: hours of argument again to persuade them of Germany first, we’ll sign agreements then they’ll carry on devoting the bulk of their strength to Japan!
It is all so maddening as it is not difficult to see that unless our united strength is directed to defeat Germany and hold Japan the war may go on indefinitely. However it is not sufficient to see something clearly. You have got to try and convince countless people as to where the truth lies when they don’t want to be acquainted with that fact.
After the war he added that the tricky part was assessing what was truly necessary to ‘hold Japan’ and that if they’d stuck better to the core strategy the war should have finished ‘a few months sooner’. (And perhaps with no nukes dropped?)
Arrived in New York on 11 May then train to DC.
Days of arguments about the basic strategy.
The trouble is that the American mind likes proceeding from the general to the particular, whilst in the problem we have to solve we cannot evolve any form of general doctrine until we have carefully examined the particular details of each problem. The background really arises out of King’s desire to find every loophole he possibly can to divert troops to the Pacific!
18/5
The Americans are now taking up the attitude that we led them down the garden path taking them to North Africa! That at Casablanca we again misled them by inducing them to attack Sicily! And now they’re not going to be led astray again. Added to that the swing towards the Pacific is stronger than ever and before long they will be urging that we should defeat Japan first!
Post-war AB added that at this period he was going through a ‘deep depression’. In spite of the successful hard work at Casablanca and the success of the strategy, the Americans still ‘failed to grasp how we were preparing for a re-entry into France through our actions in the Mediterranean’. Opening up the Mediterranean had regained the equivalent of about a million tons of shipping and thus regained ‘the strategic mobility we had lost’. And inflicted heavy losses. And now we were forcing Germany to divert more resources to defending southern Europe. This was ‘the best road’ for the liberation of France and defeat of Germany.
And yet in spite of all these advantages it was I think about this time that as I was walking with Marshall and Dill to one of our meetings Marshall said to me. ‘I find it very hard even now not to look on your North African strategy with a jaundiced eye!’ I replied, ‘What strategy would you have preferred?’ To which he answered, ‘Cross-Channel operations for the liberation of France and advance on Germany, we should finish the war quicker.’ I remember replying, ‘Yes, probably, but not the way we hope to finish it!’
It was quite evident that Marshall was quite incapable of grasping the object of our strategy nor the magnitude of operations connected with cross Channel strategy. On top of it all King had been gaining ground recently and was diverting more and more strength to the Pacific. Any attempts to unduly push our strategy on Marshall had a distinct tendency to drive him into King’s Pacific Camp. He even stated once or twice that if our strategy was to be one of wasting our time in the Mediterranean, the American forces might well be better employed in the Pacific!
To me the strategy which I had advocated from the very start, and which was at last shaping so successfully, stood out clearer and clearer every day. It was therefore not surprising that at this period my temporary inability to bring the Americans along with us filled me with depression, and at times almost with despair.
On 19/5 Marshall suggested clearing the room for an ‘off the record’ chat between the Chiefs of Staff alone with Dill and a secretary. This ‘heart to heart’ found ‘a bridge across which we could meet’. They agreed to prepare 29 divisions for entry to France in early 1944 and continued pressure in the Mediterranean. Meetings had got too big, 20-30 plus the CoS, and this made it harder for people to change positions. (Another constant problem.)
By 21/5 they had an agreement and gave it to WSC and FDR.
We spent about 1½ hours listening to PM and President holding forth on strategy and shivering lest either of them should suddenly put their fat foot right into it and reopen some of the differences which we had reconciled with such difficulty! … Thank heaven we got through it safely!
On 22/5 he went for a haircut and fell down 14 stairs ‘but no real harm’.
Basic problem. King wants to focus on the Pacific. Marshall wants to invade France ASAP with 20-30 divisions regardless of the Russian front. Portal wants to assemble the largest air force possible in England and win by bombing. Pound is obsessed with submarines. AB wants to stick to his strategy: press in the Med to divert German forces, help Russia, eventually allow invasion of France. WSC changes his mind constantly from one strategy to another, with ‘sporadic desires to invade Norway’, and more generally to do ALL operations simultaneously!
On 24/5 WSC pulled the rug out by reopening agreements and said he would redraft. Some of the things he wanted to redraft were points Britain had conceded to secure more important points. This created the suspicion among the Americans that they’d been conned, partly because the Americans knew that FDR would not take such action unless briefed to do so by his CoS: ‘it was not possible to explain to them how independent Winston was in his actions’. WSC ‘drives me to desperation’ and his behaviour ‘tragic’. WSC also suspected the two sets of CoS of ‘framing up’ against him when the reality was AB and Marshall at loggerheads. (Amazing how these dynamics repeat. I’ve seen this over and over. Principals don’t understand the dynamics of complex discussions and blunder in. Partly I think it’s a narcissism that builds up over time such that principals get into the habit of crashing things and making everyone scurry around in response. This is particularly damaging in international negotiations. Boris caused chaos in Brexit negotiations by texting European leaders about points he didn’t understand, undermining negotiators and sowing suspicions.)
Luckily the next day Harry Hopkins managed to persuade WSC not to add things that would have crashed the deal.
Finally on 25/5 the deal was done, ‘almost exactly what I wanted’. AB again comments how crucial Dill was in getting Marshall to shift. Flew home via Gibraltar, plane hit by two lightning bolts but survived (!).
Hopped to Algiers. Discussions with Eisenhower re Italy. WSC gave a speech in the Roman amphitheatre at Carthage where Christian girls had been thrown to the lions, so well built he needed no speakers.
3/6 spoke to Montgomery and had to ‘haul him over the coals’ for the trouble he was causing: ‘brilliant commander in action and trainer of men, but liable to commit untold errors in lack of tact, lack of appreciation of other people’s outlook.’ The Americans don’t like him. He needs ‘guiding and watching continually’ and Alex not ‘strong and rough enough’. Monty had annoyed Eisenhower in demanding a Fortress aircraft for his personal use. Eisenhower gave it to him but was very annoyed by Monty’s behaviour and the dislike remained for the rest of the war. He was grateful for having his failings pointed out, ‘this gratitude was genuine and not assumed, of that I am certain’. He suffered bad misunderstandings because he was unable to assess other’s feelings ‘through excessive concentration on his own’.
Home on 5 June. 10/6 a trip north to Northumberland for inspections and sneaked in a return to the Farne Islands where he’d lost his cameras in the sea, saw the eider duck, guillemots etc.
On 15/6 WSC told AB that he wanted him to take the Supreme Command of Operations for the invasion of France when the time came. It gave a AB ‘one of my greatest thrills during the war’. He was sworn to secrecy and did not even tell his wife. When WSC met her later he asked what she thought of the idea and was surprised that AB had not told her! WSC wanted to make Sholto Douglas the Supreme Commander for South East Asia but the Americans objected for reasons they couldn’t discover so it went to Mountbatten, but AB thought Douglas would have done it better.
18/6, COS taken up with the press:
… an interview with the deputy of the Minister of Information [Bracken] in order to try and regulate the press which as usual is discussing the fact that it is inevitable that we should carry out exactly what we propose to do! So far it has worked quite well as a ‘double cross’, as the Germans cannot imagine that we should be such fools as to give the press such liberty! We cannot hope to go on fooling them in this way. [Even when the goal is ‘beat Hitler’ the same problems arise as always.]
On 22/6 he spent £1,500 on 45 volumes of Gould’s Birds, he had ‘wonderful value from them as an antidote to the war and to Winston’ and after the war doubled his money.
23/6 discussion of a new idea to fool radar, dropping strips of metal to confuse radar readings, codename WINDOWS. [Note to DC: when reading RV Jones look this up.]
29/6 meeting to discuss the new rocket Germany was developing, one of the first meetings on the V2. Decision to bomb Peenemunde ASAP. At this time the scientists couldn’t figure out how they would be launched.
It is very fortunate that this weapon did not materialise at that time and never appeared till the final stages of the war.
1/7 AB spoke to some of those from the ‘Chindits’, a special forces experiment connected to the 22 SAS experiment. Cf. 4/8. AB thought the experiment a success but it required the best people, best equipment so was hard to scale. Unfortunately Winston took Wingate to Canada for the conference and time was lost.
Tricky calculations re using the Azores for the submarine war without driving Spain further towards Germany.
On 7/7 WSC again said to AB he wanted him to be Supreme Commander of the invasion from January-February 1944: 'he ‘said that I was the only man he had sufficient confidence in to take over the job’. Cf. 15/6. AB was too excited to sleep.
Was fate going to allow me to command the force destined to play the final part in the strategy I had been struggling for? It seemed too much to hope for that the strategy should pan out as I had wanted and that in addition I should command the forces destined for the final blow. Fortunately I realised well all the factors that might influence the final decision and did not let my optimism carry me off my feet.
8/7 a big row between WSC and Eden over de Gaulle with ‘a long tirade of abuse of de Gaulle from Winston which I heartily agreed with’ though AB thought it sadly late in coming and he ‘should have been cast overboard a year ago’ but every time Eden ‘pleaded’ with WSC ‘and Winston forgave’. An evening wasted for 10 minutes work.
9/7 COS discussing manpower.
We have now reached a stage where all three services and industry supplying them are living above their means in manpower. Cuts must be made. Unfortunately, while recognising that cuts must be made, Winston won’t face up to reducing formations. It is useless retaining emaciated formations which we cannot maintain and I refuse to do so, and that leads to differences of opinion of the severest nature with Winston!
Winston’s desire was to retain formations long after it had been made clear that the manpower conditions no longer admitted of their retention. It was almost a childish dislike to have his battalions and divisions reduced. This feeling increased as the USA formations outnumbered ours. I could not make him realise that it was a matter of living in a fools paradise to maintain emaciated divisions. I tried repeatedly to explain that the efficiency of formations rapidly deteriorated when unable to maintain their numbers. It was all of no use. He became more and more obstinate, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that I obtained my way in this matter.
A discussion with a commander back from Burma:
I was appalled at listening to what he had to say as regards the morale of the troops and their inferiority complex in relation to the Japs. We shall have to do something very drastic to get matters right.
Reports started coming in about the Sicily attack. Nerve wracking for AB given he had pushed it through against widespread opposition, including even his own Joint Planners (see above).
On 14/7 WSC asked AB’s wife what she thought of him taking Supreme Command, she did not know what he was talking about as WSC had sworn AB to secrecy (see 15/6 and 7/7).
On 15/7 funeral for Sikorski, Polish leader, who had died in a plane accident. AB then had to fly to Norfolk: ‘Attending funerals in war of victims of air accidents is not a sustaining process to one’s flying nerves and should be avoided!’ Further meeting that night at No10 on the idea of dropping aluminium from planes to fool radar (see above), bomb shelters, and possible Quebec conference.
16/7 further discussion of manpower cuts. WSC going sector by sector but ‘the problem can only be approached as a whole. We must relate manpower to our strategy and it must be allotted according to the strategic requirements of the services.’
By 19/20 July attention was shifting to what next after Sicily.
21/7 AB had to deal with another problem caused by Monty’s crassness.
The McNaughton incident was an excellent example of unnecessary clashes caused by failings in various personalities. In the first place it was typical of Monty… Secondly it was typical of Alex not to have the strength of character to sit on Monty and stop him being foolish. Thirdly it was typical of McNaughton’s ultra political outlook always to look for some slight to his position…
This, and some similar excerpts from these diaries, should be put up on the Cabinet room wall for people to point to and relieve tension!
Re 22/7 AB refers to the number of social events and says though it may seem odd given there was a war on many important discussions happened at them. On 23/7 he turhed 60.
25/7 to Chequers. AB and WSC in agreement on Mediterranean strategy but know it will be hard to persuade the Americans. Suddenly news arrived of Mussolini’s abdication, a shift from ‘the end of the beginning’ to ‘the beginning of the end’.
Discussions over next few days about armistice conditions for Italy and preparations for the next Allied conference in Canada. Interesting that at one point after a telegram from Eisenhower at 130am, WSC woke the War Cabinet for a meeting which ended 4am. (Again a reminder of how WSC governed through the War Cabinet. Blair, Cameron, Boris would all have handled matters as they saw fit in the middle of the night and informed the War Cabinet of their decisions. Problems with Boris and covid were sharper because he could not chair meetings so any and all such large meetings inevitably sowed confusion. He could only function properly in meetings of less than five, ideally ≤3. All bigger meetings were ‘performances’, not ‘meetings’.)
4/8 FDR wanted to declare Rome an ‘open city’ so it would not be destroyed. COS and Cabinet all ‘strongly opposed’.
5/8 off to Canada on Queen Mary, arrived on 9th. WSC told the waiter to stop pouring so much water, ‘it’s too depressing a sight’.
AB: our course is clear, knock Italy out, occupy as much as we need to improve bombing of Germany, force withdrawal of Germany from Russia, Balkans, France. ‘If we pin Germany in Italy she cannot find enough forces to meet all her commitments.’ Discussions re what force is needed to invade France, how much Germany must be weakened to make it possible. Rumours that Marshall may be replaced by Somervell with King as an ally. WSC started obsessing on Northern Sumatra.
11/8 AB gloomy about the Americans: they ‘imagine that the war can be run by a series of legal contracts based on false concepts as to what may prevail six months ahead’. Dudley Pound clearly physically failing, nearly toppled into a ravine and was caught by Mountbatten. (Is there an explanation of why he wasn’t replaced sooner?!)
13/8 AB pleasantly surprised by the American papers. He had to chair the meetings so had to read all the papers and figure out the details, run COS to ensure they had one voice, run the meetings with the Americans, and keep WSC informed re progress and problems.
15/8 WSC saw FDR and Hopkins who pressed WSC to make Marshall Supreme Commander for the invasion of France:
… and as far as I can gather Winston gave in, in spite of having previously promised me the job! He asked me how I felt about it and I told him that I could not feel otherwise than disappointed. He then said that Eisenhower would replace Marshall and that Alexander was to replace Eisenhower…
I remember it as if it was yesterday as we walked up and down on the terrace outside the drawing room of the Citadel. Looking down on to that wonderful view… As Winston spoke all that scenery was swamped by a dark cloud of despair. I had voluntarily given up the opportunity of taking over the North African command before El Alamein… I had done so, as I previously stated, because I felt at that time I could probably serve a more useful purpose by remaining with Winston. But now the strategy of the war had been guided to the final stage, the stage when the real triumph of victory was to be gathered, I felt no longer necessarily tied to Winston, and free to assume the Supreme Command which he had already promised me on three separate occasions. It was a crushing blow to hear from him that he was now handing over this appointment to the Americans, and had an exchange received the agreement of the President to Mountbatten’s appointment as Supreme Commander for South East Asia!
Not for one moment did he realise what this meant to me. He offered no sympathy, no regrets at having had to change his mind, and dealt with the matter as if it were one of minor importance! The only reference to my feelings in his official history [V, p.76] is that I ‘bore the great disappointment with soldierly dignity’. On the same page he describes the reasons that lay behind this change, namely the fact that it was now evident that in the cross-Channel operations the proportion of American forces would be considerably in excess of ours. It was better therefore that the Supreme Commander should be an American. At the time this fact did not soften the blow, which took me several months to recover from.
Bad, bad leadership from WSC.
In the afternoon, AB failed to get Marshall to see ‘the relation between cross-Channel and Italian operations’:
It is quite impossible to argue with him as he does not even begin to understand a strategic problem! He has not even read the plans worked out by Morgan for the cross Channel operation and consequently was not even in a position to begin to appreciate its difficulties and requirements. The only real argument he produced was a threat to the effect that if we pressed our point the build up in England would be reduced to that of a small Corps and the whole war reoriented towards Japan.
After dinner talked to Dill who had had a private chat with Marshall and found him ‘most unmanageable and irreconcilable, even threatening to resign if we pressed our point’. Marshall wanted to push everything into D-Day at the expense of Italy.
My contention was that the Italian theatre was essential to render the cross Channel operation possible and consequently the two operations were inter-dependent. By giving full priority to the cross Channel preparations you might well cripple the Italian theatre and thus render it unable to contain the German forces necessary to render the cross Channel operation possible.
On 16/8 they again cleared the room (as in previous conferences, see above). AB said the problem was trust — the Americans didn’t trust Britain to ‘put our full hearts’ into invading France in spring 1944 and ‘we have not full confidence that they would not in future insist on our carrying out previous agreements irrespective of changed strategic conditions.’ He again went through why pushing in Italy was necessary to enable successful invasion of France. Some progress. The next day the Americans accepted the European arguments. Again Dill played a crucial role as intermediary between AB and Marshall.
(Great teams need all sorts of characters. Diplomats who inspire real trust, like Dill, are one of those types. The critical leadership skill is figuring out who has what talents and holes and is therefore suitable for which job. As Lee Kuan Yew says, this ability, or sense, is weakly correlated with IQ. And if someone at the top of the organisation does not have both this skill and the moral strength to enforce judgements, entropy swiftly takes over.)
19/8 WSC insisting on attacking Northern Sumatra regardless of the overall plan against Japan. Behaving like ‘a spoiled child that wants a toy in a shop’. Makes negotiations with Americans almost impossible. WSC had got out a pair of dividers and worked out bombing ranges. Furious argument. AB saying it didn’t fit the plan and WSC had to know where he was going, WSC shaking his fist and saying ‘he did not want to know’! In the middle of this rowing Mountbatten came up and asked AB to remember to speak to the Americans about the aircraft carriers made of ice (‘Habbakuk’), to which AB replied ‘To hell with Habbakuk’, he did not have time for ice carriers. ‘However he went on begging…’
Later, they slowly made progress on the Far East. As the meeting came to an end Mountbatten rushed up to remind AB of Habbakuk. AB told Marshall there would be a presentation. Mountbatten summoned in attendants with large ice blocks, some normal, some altered to make them tougher and more suitable to be made into carriers.
He then informed us that in order to prove his statements he had brought a revolver with him and intended to fire shots at the cubes to prove their properties! As he now pulled a revolver out of his pocket we all rose and discreetly moved behind him. He then warned us that he would fire at the ordinary block of ice to show how it splintered and warned us to watch the splinters. He proceeded to fire and we were subjected to a pail of ice ice splinters! ‘There’ said Dickie, ‘that is just what I told you; now I shall fire at the block on the right to show you the difference.’ He fired, and there certainly was a difference; the bullet rebounded out of the block and bust round our legs like an angry bee!
That was the end of the display of shooting in the Frontenac Hotel drawing rooms, but it was not the end of the story.
It will be remembered that when our original meeting had become too heated, we had cleared the room of all the attending staff. They were waiting in an adjoining room and when the revolver shots were heard, the wag of the party shouted, ‘Good heavens, they’ve started shooting now!!’
WHAT A FANTASTIC TALE!! I’ll leave it there for today!
20-21/8 Tricky business getting a paper on the Japan strategy through COS, WSC, Americans. On 22/8 AB got a letter from his wife — their son had been knocked over by a car in Westminster, unconscious, hospital, but no lasting damage.
23/8, last day but one.
The strain of arguing difficult problems with the Americans who try to run the war on a series of lawyer’s agreements which, when once signed, can never be departed from, is trying enough. But when you add to it all the background of a peevish temperamental prima donna of a Prime Minister, suspicious to the very limits of imagination, always fearing a military combination of effort against political dominance, the whole matter becomes quite unbearable! He has been more unreasonable and trying than ever this time. He has during the sea voyage in a few idle moments become married to the idea that success against Japan can only be secured through the capture of the north tip of Sumatra! He has become like a peevish child asking for a forbidden toy. We have had no real opportunity of even studying the operation for its merits and possibilities and yet he wants us to press the Americans for its execution!…
I am not really satisfied with the results, we have not really arrived at the best strategy, but I suppose that when working with allies, compromises, with all their evils, become inevitable.
24/8:
The conference is finished and I am feeling the inevitable flatness and depression which swamps me after a spell of continuous work, and of battling against difficulties, differences of opinion, stubbornness, stupidity, pettiness, and pigheadedness. When suddenly the whole struggle stops abruptly and all the participants of the conference disperse in all directions, the feeling of emptiness, depression, loneliness and dissatisfaction over results attacks one and swamps one! After Casablanca, wondering alone in the garden of the Mamounia Hotel in Marrakesh, if it had not been for the birds and the company they provided, I could almost have sobbed with the loneliness. Tonight the same feeling is overwhelming, and there are no birds!
The conference broke up. AB and Portal stayed on for two days fishing to recover. WSC called up 'in a bad prima donna highly strung condition’.
25/8 Reading the previous day he says he must have been ‘very liverish’ and felt like removing them. He drove off to a lake for fishing, enjoying himself, when WSC turned up — ‘I could have shot them both I felt so angry’! Bears frequent visitors.
28/8 Flying home. He said goodbye to Dudley Pound not realising he would not see him again. He ‘went on working till he dropped’.
I am certain that he had been suffering from his complaint for some time... He was a grand colleague to work with and now that I realise how sick a man he was lately I withdraw any unkind remarks I may have made in my diary concerning his slowness and lack of drive.
Home 29/8. Relief at being away from WSC for a bit. He’d been a mix of temperamental film star and spoilt child. He grabbed an idea for an operation then when people point out difficulties he feels everybody is out to thwart him, he appoints new teams to reconsider why the operation will work etc. (Sounds like Boris with his bridge/tunnel to Ireland!)
I wonder whether any historian of the future will ever be able to paint Winston in his true colours. It is a wonderful character — the most marvellous qualities and superhuman genius mixed with an astonishing lack of vision at times, and an impetuosity which if not guided must inevitably bring him into trouble again and again. Perhaps the most remarkable failing of his is that he can never see a whole strategical problem at once. His gaze always settles on some definite part of the canvas and the rest of the picture is lost. It is difficult to make him realise the influence of one theatre on another. The general handling of the German reserves in Europe can never be fully grasped by him. This feeling is accentuated by the fact that often he does not want to see the whole picture, especially if this wider vision should in any way interfere with the operation he may have temporarily set his heart on. He is quite the most difficult man to work with that I have ever struck, but I should not have missed the chance of working with him for anything on Earth.
(In 2013 I wrote about political education and how to train people to have a ‘systems view’. This terminology wasn’t used in 1943 but this is what AB is talking about. In the last few weeks I’ve talked to some officers about these diaries. When would you study them in your career in the British Army? The replies have been very gloomy. ‘We talk a lot about strategy but we don’t really do strategy any more in the way Alanbrooke thought of it.’ (I’ve also talked to special forces soldiers who’ve read these diaries, sometimes on planes on the way to operations; comforting to hear, though they’ve all now left/leaving the army!) It connects to the Bismarck line (above) on Schleswig-Holstein — seeing the interdependencies in a complex system was the trickiest thing. How to train people to develop this skill is a crucial challenge but not one that is seriously addressed now in Britain.)
Over the next week bad then good news about landings in Italy. On 20/9 went to No10 to discuss WSC speech drafts til 2am, the table littered with segments and comments from people. AB replaced Paget (excellent) with Montgomery to lead British forces invading France, mainly because of experience of command in action. WSC tried to appoint the wrong person as new First Sea Lord but fortunately the person declined and the right person was appointed. (NB. How much of AB’s time was spent on critical decisions re people, not micromanaging the people.)
28/9 More wild plans from WSC re operations in the Far East, WSC in a foul mood convinced of plots to scupper his ideas. The next day WSC took a different tone, perhaps making amends. WSC stressed support for the Med strategy and said he planned to see Stalin in Tehran in October.
1/10, COS:
This resulted in an hour’s pitched battle between me and the PM on the question of withdrawing troops from the Mediterranean for the Indian Ocean offensive. I was refusing to impair our amphibious potential power in the Mediterranean in order to equip Mountbatten for adventures in Sumatra. He on the other hand was prepared to scrap our basic policy and put Japan before Germany. However I defeated most of his evil intentions in the end!
5/10, Cabinet, Smuts raised the question of whether they should aim for dismembering Germany or whether a strong Germany might assist in ‘balancing power in Europe against Russia’. (First mention of this crucial idea being discussed in the diaries I think. Smuts, who I know nothing about, seems always ahead of the pack.)
6-7/10, rows over Rhodes and Kos. WSC wanting to attack, AB wanting to keep focus on Italy. Night of 7/10, WSC summoned AB to No10 for another go, air raid, WSC took his daughter to her AA battery in Hyde Park, WSC reminiscing about being on that exact spot with his nanny and wanting to go home to play with his solders!
He is in a very dangerous condition, most unbalanced, and God knows how we shall finish this war if this goes on.
Next day:
I am slowly becoming convinced that in his old age Winston is becoming less and less well balanced! I can control him no more. He has worked himself into a frenzy of excitement about the Rhodes attack, has magnified its importance so that he can no longer see anything else and has set his heart on capturing this one island even at the expense of endangering his relations with the President and with the Americans, and also the whole future of Italian campaign. He refuses to listen to any arguments or to see any dangers! He wired to the President asking for Marshall to come out to the Mediterranean for a conference in Tunis to settle the matter, hoping in his heart to be able to swing the meeting by his personality. However, the President sent him back a very cold reply asking him not to influence operations in the Mediterranean. This did not satisfy him and he wired back again asking President to reconsider the matter. The whole thing is sheer madness, and he’s placing himself quite unnecessarily in a very false position! The Americans are already desperately suspicious of him and this will make matters far worse…
I am afraid matters will go on deteriorating rather than improving. If they do I shall not be able to stick it much longer!
It should be remembered that the Americans always suspected Winston of having concealed desires to spread into the Balkans. These fears were not entirely ungrounded! They were determined that whatever happened they would not be led into the Balkans. At times I think that they imagined I supported Winston’s Balkan ambitions, which was far from being the case. Anyhow the Balkan ghost in the cupboard made my road none the easier in leading the Americans by the hand through Italy!
13/10, discussion with ‘Bomber’ Harris, AB clearly sceptical of Harris’ claims re efficacy.
A gloomy period. 20/10:
One of those days when even sunshine fails to dispel the gloom that lies on one. All life, and all its enterprises looked black. In every problem the molehills became mountains, and failure seem to be the inevitable result of all enterprise. A desperate feeling of failure, incompetency and incapacity to carry this burden any longer!
Dudley Pound dead, Cunningham to the COS meetings and AB highly (unusually) complimentary.
25/10, our build up in Italy too slow, coming to standstill. This is product of diverting resources to invading France, ‘it is quite heartbreaking when we see what we might have done this year if our strategy had not been distorted by the Americans’:
The stagnation of our operations at that time was very disturbing… [T]he main trouble was the American desire to now swing priorities round to the Channel and in doing so render it impossible to gather the full fruits of our present strategic position. We were now firmly established in the lower part of the leg of Italy. We had command of the air and command of the sea. The enemy flanks therefore remained open to combined operations on both sides throughout the length of Italy. The main artery of rail communication consisted of one double line of railway open to air attack throughout its length. The Italian forces had only one desire and that was to finish with the war. Conditions were therefore ideal for hitting the enemy hard and for enforcing on him the use of reserves in the defence of Italy.
The attitude of Ike’s HQ was not encouraging. I knew that he never really appreciated the strategic advantages of Italy, and that the American blindfolded cross Channel policy must appeal to him as being easier to understand.
We had certainly arrived at the time when the most active planning and preparation was necessary for next year’s cross Channel operation, but these plans and preparations must not be allowed to slow down operations in Italy, which were themselves one of the most important of the preparations. The American outlook was unfortunately one of, ‘We have already wasted for too much time in the Mediterranean doing nothing, let us now lose no more time in this secondary theatre. Let us transfer and allot all available resources to the main theatre and finish the war quickly in Germany.’ [What’s the best historian analysis of this question?]
After the 28/10 he wrote after the war that it was ‘rather strange’ how little he referred to events in Russia, which I’ve thought. Unless I’ve missed it there is no reference to the astonishing Operation Citadel and the greatest tank battles ever fought in summer 1943!? Perhaps it’s because people tend to focus on the things they can control and the Eastern Front wasn’t one of them (other than indirectly via supplies etc)?.
On 29/10 AB began a campaign to get a peerage for Dill, WSC promised but it didn’t appear. (Depressing when one thinks how easily they are handed out to utter idiots these days.)
1/11:
When I look at the Mediterranean I realise only too well how far I have failed in my task during the last two years! If only I had had sufficient force of character to swing those American Chiefs of Staff and make them see daylight, how different the war might be. We should have been in a position to force the Dardanelles by the capture of Crete and Rhodes, we should have the whole Balkans ablaze by now, and the war might have been finished in 1943! Instead, to satisfy American shortsightedness we have been led into agreeing to the withdrawal of forces from the Mediterranean for a nebulous 2nd front, and have emasculated our offensive strategy! It is heartbreaking. I blame myself and yet at the same time doubt whether it was humanly possible to alter the American point of view more than I succeeded in doing?…
… I was evidently suffering from a heavy cold and had also not yet fully recovered from the strain of the Quebec Conference. Reading between some of the lines I wrote I am inclined to think that I cannot have been very far off from nervous breakdown at that time. Nevertheless there is a great deal in what I wrote on the evening of November 1st. If the Americans had cooperated wholeheartedly in the Mediterranean and had been able to appreciate the advantages to be gained events might well have turned out to our advantage. Unfortunately just at a moment when there were some fruits to be gained from the efforts we had made, the Americans selected this as a moment to damp down our efforts; troops, landing craft and transport were moved and reallocated. At very little cost Crete and Rhodes could have been rendered possible operations without affecting operations in Italy, whereas as matters stood these operations were only possible at the expense of Italian operations and consequently ruled out. Success in Crete and Rhodes might have had the happiest repercussions in Turkey and the Balkans without ever committing a single man in the Balkans…
9/11 We must delay D-Day for two months so we can get to the Pisa-Rimini line. We must centralise command of the Mediterranean. The partisans in Balkans must be rearmed much faster. Turkey must be brought into the war and the Dardanelles opened. Balkan states must be made to sue for peace.
11/11 Meeting with JIC to reorganise the ‘research organisation’ as required by German rockets. [Check with RV Jones later.]
16/11 A row with Eden who wanted to cut funding for Greek partisans who’d been ‘doing most of the work’ because the FO didn’t like their communistic views. AB won Cabinet support.
Then off to Cairo for another conference:
This one, however, was badly prepared for, and what was far more serious, badly staged. We had stated that we wanted to meet the Americans first to clear our minds with them and establish a common policy. Then to meet the Russians to complete matter with the defeat of Germany and finally to meet Chiang Kai-shek to discuss operations against Japan. Owing to American pressure we let the tail wag the dog and started with Chiang Kai-shek.
18/11, Malta, meeting with the PM in bed:
He is inclined to say to the Americans, all right if you won’t play with us in the Mediterranean we won’t play with you in the English Channel. And if they say all right well then we shall direct our main effort in the Pacific, to reply you are welcome to do so if you wish! I do not think such tactics will pay…
There are times when I feel that it is all a horrid nightmare which I must wake up out of soon. All this floundering about, this lack of clear vision, and lack of vision! PM examining war by theatres and without perspective, no clear appreciation of the influence of one theatre on another! …
Alexander charming as he is fills me with gloom, he is a very, very small man and cannot see big. Unfortunately he does not recognise this fact and is oblivious to his shortcomings! Perhaps it is as well or he might get an inferiority complex! But I shudder at the thought of him as a Supreme Commander! He will never have the personality or vision to command three services! It is hard to advise him as he fails really to grasp the significance of things.
First of all the new feelings of spitefulness which had been apparent lately with Winston since the strength of the American forces were now building up fast and exceeding ours. He hated having to give up the position of the dominant partner which we had held at the start. As a result he became inclined at times to put up strategic proposals which he knew were unsound purely to spite Americans. He was in fact aiming at ‘cutting off his nose to spite his face’. It was usually fairly easy to swing him back on the right line and to get rid of these whims. There lay, however, in the back of his mind the desire to form a purely British theatre when the laurels would be all ours... Austria or the Balkans seemed to attract him for such a front.
Winston’s views on command always remained confused throughout the war. He could not or would not follow how a chain of command was applied. He was always wanting a Commander-in-Chief to suddenly vacate his post and concentrate on commanding one individual element of his command at the expense of all the rest. It was therefore a matter of considerable difficulty when the system of command in the various theatres had to be readjusted to meet new developments.
19/11 WSC expounded to AB his ideas for a post-war slogan, ‘FOOD, HOUSE AND WORK FOR EVERYONE’. That day Winant introduced AB to Earl Grey’s views on studying nature during war in the Fallodon Papers. [I think this is a confusion — the author of the Fallodon papers was Viscount Grey, Foreign Secretary during WW1 — not Earl Grey, who was a cousin of the Viscount? Humphry, please let me know!]
20/11, gloomy about the conference:
[The Americans] drag on us has seriously affected our Mediterranean strategy and the whole conduct of the war… I blame myself for having had the vision to foresee these possibilities and yet to have failed to overcome the American shortsightedness and allowed my better judgement to have been affected by them. It would have been better to have resigned my appointment than to allow any form of compromise. And yet I wonder whether any such action would have born any fruits. I rather doubt it.
Germany’s vast forces were served by ‘the most perfect East and West railway system in existence … reinforced by the autobahn system of roads’.
It was easier for the Germans to convey divisions from the Russian front to the French front than it was for us to convey similar formations from the Italian front by sea to the French front. The North and South communications were, however, nothing like as efficient, comprising only one double line of railway through the leg of Italy and one through the Balkans to Greece.
Our strategy had now become a delicate matter of balancing. Our aim must be to draw as many divisions as possible from the French Channel and to retain them in Southern Europe as long as possible. Any failure to draw full advantage from our present position must also fail in drawing reserves away from the Channel. On the other hand any tendency to weaken our forces in the Mediterranean would at once lead to the move of German forces to the Channel.
When arguing with Marshall I could never get him to appreciate the very close connection that existed between the various German fronts. For him they might have been separate wars... I have often wondered since the war how different matters might have been if I had had MacArthur instead of Marshall to deal with. From everything I saw of him I put him down as the greatest general of the last war. He certainly showed a far greater strategic grasp than Marshall. I must however confess that Winston was no great help in the handling of Marshall, in fact the reverse. Marshall had a holy fear of Winston’s Balkans and Dardanelles adventures, and was always guarding against these dangers even when they did not exist.
Timing was confused by travel arrangements including Stalin going to Tehran and Chiang Kai-shek ‘and Madame’ arriving too soon.
We should never [underlined in original] have started our conference with Chiang; by doing so we were putting the cart before the horse. He had nothing to contribute towards the defeat of the Germans, and for the matter of that uncommonly little towards the defeat of the Japanese. Why the Americans attached such importance to Chang I have never discovered. All he did was lead them down the garden path to a Communist China! We should have started this conference by thrashing out thoroughly with the Americans the policy and strategy for the defeat of Germany. We could then have showed a united front to Stalin and finally, if time admitted, seen Chiang and Madame.
23/11, first meeting with Chiang:
I was very interested in the Chinese pair. The Generalissimo reminded me more of a cross between a pine marten and a ferret than anything else. A shrewd, foxy sort of face. Evidently with no grasp of war in its larger aspects but determined to get the best of the bargains. Madame was a study in herself, a queer character in which sex and politics seemed to predominate, both being used indiscriminately individually or unitedly to achieve her ends. Not good looking, with a flat Mongolian face with high cheekbones and a flat turned up nose with two long circular nostrils looking like two dark holes leading into her head. Jet black hair and sallow complexion. If not good looking she had certainly made the best of herself and was well turned out. A black satin dress with a yellow chrysanthemum pattern on it, a neat black jacket, big black tulle bows at the back of her head and a black veil over her face, light coloured stockings and black shoes with large brass nails covering small feet. Tapered fingers playing with a long cigarette holder in which she smoked continuous cigarettes. The meeting was a slow performance with everything interpreted by the Chinese General reinforced by Madame!…
I have never known whether Madame Chiang gatecrashed into the morning’s meeting or whether she was actually invited. It makes little difference for I feel certain she would have turned up whether she was invited or not. She was the only woman amongst a very large gathering of men, and was determined to bring into action all the charms nature had blessed her with. Although not good looking she certainly had a good figure which she knew how to display at its best. Also gifted with great charm and gracefulness, every small movement of hers arrested and pleased the eye. For instance at one critical moment her closely clinging black dress of black satin with yellow chrysanthemums displayed a slit which extended to the hip bone and exposed one of the most shapely of legs. This caused a rustle amongst those attending the conference and I even thought I heard a suppressed neigh come from a group of some of the younger members!
The trouble that lay behind all this was that we were left wondering whether we were dealing with Chiang or with Madame. Whenever he was addressed his Chinese General sitting on his right interpreted for him, but as soon as he had finished Madame said ‘Excuse me gentlemen, I do not think that the interpreter has conveyed the full meaning to the Generalissimo’. Similarly, whenever Chiang spoke his General duly interpreted the statement, but Madame rose to say in the most perfect English, ‘Excuse me gentlemen, but the General has failed to convey to you the full meaning of the thoughts that the Generalissimo wishes to express. If you will allow me I shall put before you his real thoughts.’ You were left wondering as to whom you were dealing with. I certainly felt that she was the leading spirit of the two and that I would not trust her very far. [I cannot help think of Boris going up to the flat, the stream of WhatsApps beginning, and nobody in the office below confident to judge what was him and what was her.]
… [Chiang] and his Chinese forces never did much against the Japs during the war, and did not even succeed in keeping his country from becoming communist after the war. And yet the Americans never saw through all his shortcomings, pinned their hopes to him and induced us to do the same. I often wonder how Marshall failed to realise what a broken reed Chiang was when he went out to China just after the defeat of Japan. Marshall's advisers were bad…
There was ‘a second Chinese farce’ that day in discussions over Burma. Laboriously worked out plans had been given to the Chinese staff. AB asked for their views. ‘There ensued the most ghastly silence.’ Finally they said they wanted to listen more.
This was followed by a silence in which you could have heard a pin drop, whilst I wracked my brain as to what to do next! I then explained to them carefully that we had already spent hours of deliberation to arrive at the plans we had submitted. That our deliberations on these plans were now finished, and that the plans rested with them to express their views in relation to them. Finally I asked them once more to express their own views and criticisms. This was followed by another of those deadly silences broken only by Chinese whisperings. Just when I could no longer bear the silence up got the same Chinese spokesman and repeated the very same words: ‘We wish to listen to your deliberations’!
I felt all eyes turn on me with a suppressed sound of amusement wondering what I should do next. And for a few seconds I had no idea what I should do next. [He suggested they take another 24 hours to study the plans and the meeting ended.] Mopping my brow I turned to Marshall and said ‘That was a ghastly waste of time!’ To which he replied, ‘You’re telling me!’ Considering that it was thanks to him and the American outlook that we had had to suffer this distressing interlude I felt that he might have expressed his regret otherwise.
These two episodes on one day went a long way to convince me there was little to be hoped for from Chiang’s China.
[At some point, someone reading this blog will have a meeting about AI with the leader of a major government and remember this meeting and how the fate of millions is often in the hands of such people and such meetings.]
24/11
Another ‘lamentable fiasco’ with the Chinese, more ‘devastating silences’. Clear they understood ‘nothing about strategy … and were quite unfit to discuss these questions’.
25/11
Looking at all the politicians and diplomats assembled for photos AB was struck by how ‘crooked’ they looked!
AB proposed active Med operations at the expense of postponing D-Day. A better reaction than expected.
27/11 To Tehran.
Given poor security at the American Embassy, FDR stayed at the Soviet Embassy for the conferences. [Has a US President stayed in a Russian Embassy since?!]
No agreement with America on key points. PM ill, lost his voice. ‘Heading towards chaos’.
FDR made a poor start and ‘the conference went from bad to worse’. Hours of discussion between the three led to ‘confusing plans more than they ever have been before’.
The meeting had, however, been of intense interest and a great deal had been made clear which I had not yet realised. This was the first occasion during the war when Stalin, Roosevelt and Winston sat round a table to discuss the war we were waging together. I found it quite enthralling looking at their faces and trying to estimate what lay behind. With Churchill of course I knew fairly well, and I was beginning to understand the workings of Roosevelt's brain, as we had had several meetings with him, but Stalin was still very much of an enigma. I had already formed a very high idea of his ability, force of character and shrewdness, but did not know yet whether he was also a strategist…
During this meeting and all the subsequent ones which we had with Stalin, I rapidly grew to appreciate the fact that he had a military brain of the very highest calibre. Never once in any of his statements did he make any strategic error, nor did he ever fail to appreciate all the implications of the situation with a quick and unerring eye.
In this respect he stood out when compared with his two colleagues. Roosevelt never made any great pretence at being a strategist and left Marshall or Leahy to talk for him. Winston, on the other hand, was far more erratic, brilliant at times but far too impulsive and inclined to favour quite unsuitable plans without giving them the preliminary deep thought they required…
Stalin was now evidently far better satisfied with his defensive position [on the eastern front]. He was beginning to feel that the Germans had shot their bolt; immediate pressure on the West was no longer so urgently required… The entry of Turkey was no longer so desirable. He no longer had (if he had ever had) any great desire for the opening of the Dardanelles. This would bring in the British and the Americans on his left flank in an advance westward through the Balkans. He had by then pretty definite ideas about how he wanted the Balkans run after the war and this would entail, if possible, their total inclusion in the future Union of Soviet Republics. British and American assistance was therefore no longer desirable in the Eastern Mediterranean.
His new outlook on Italy was also interesting. There was now no pressure on our forces to push up the leg of Italy. Such an advance led too directly towards Yugoslavia and Austria, on which no doubt he had by now cast covetous eyes. He approved of Roosevelt's futile proposals to close down operations in Italy and to transfer six divisions to invade Southern France on April 1st, whilst the main Channel operation would take place on 1st May. I am certain he did not approve such operations for their strategic value, but because they fitted in with his future political plans. He was too good a strategist not to see the weakness of the American plan. To cease operations in Italy before Rome would at once free the required [German] reinforcements to meet six of our divisions under the precarious conditions of the landing and all the subsequent administrative problems connected with their maintenance on this new front. The potential war effort of our divisions on transfer from Italy to Southern France would in the early stages have been reduced by half. Furthermore this plan allowed for the whole of the month of April for the annihilation of the six divisions whilst fighting in Italy was at a standstill and OVERLORD had not yet started. I feel certain that Stalin saw through these strategical misconceptions, but to him they mattered little; his political and military requirements could now be best met by the greatest squandering of British and American lives in the French theatre.
We were reaching a very dangerous point where Stalin shrewdness, assisted by American shortsightedness, might lead us anywhere.
[Does anybody know if Russian sources support AB’s guesses?]
29/11
More bad discussions. Stalin pushing just two key points: 1) start OVERLORD on 1 May; 2) also offensive in southern France. ‘Americans supported this view quite unaware of the fact that it is already an impossibility.’
After listening to the arguments put forward during the last two days I feel more like entering a lunatic asylum or a nursing home then continuing with my present job. I am absolutely disgusted with the politicians’ methods of waging a war!! Why will they imagine that they are experts at a job they know nothing about! It is lamentable to listen to them! May God help us in the future prosecution of this war, we have every hope of making an unholy mess of it and of being defeated yet!
On 30/11 the British and Americans met to try to find a common line. They eventually agreed OVERLORD could be delayed until 1 June and they’d try something in southern France. After more meetings, ‘One thing is quite clear, the more politicians you put together to settle the prosecution of the war the longer you postpone its conclusion!’
Some celebration of WSC’s 69th birthday. Many toasts, Russian style. Later on an amazing desert was brought in, tottering on ice blocks. AB spotted that candles were melting the ice and the whole edifice was about to crumble, he ducked, it slid off the waiters’ plates, SMASH, Stalin’s interpreter was covered in pudding and ice, but, being Stalin’s interpreter, carried on — ‘I suppose it was more than his life’s worth to stop interpreting!’ AB got towels and mopped him down.
Overall from AB’s perspective, success — OVERLORD had been delayed, operations in Italy were on a firmer footing. Every division removed from Italy had to be returned to Britain, put in a base, trained for a hard task, equipped etc so inevitably took months.
I found these conferences very trying and I became more and more peevish as they went on, which accounts a great deal for the overcritical attitude assumed at times in my diaries. In my mind the course to be adopted seemed so clear and obvious that I found it maddening not to be able to make them see as clearly as I saw. Not being gifted with an over patient nature it reacted on me by making me take an over gloomy view of the progress we were making.
1-3/12
AB traveling, Jerusalem, Cairo. On 3rd AB and the COS were ‘dumbfounded’ to be informed that the meeting must finish on Sunday at the latest because the President had to leave, after screwing everything up by bringing in useless Chinag Kai-shek at the start instead of getting an actual plan.
On 4/12, meeting with WSC and FDR. AB told them all that the conference had been badly organised. Instead of figuring out a policy then getting political agreement then investigating ways and means to see if it could be done, they had started with the Chinese then rushed to see Stalin. AB said they should drop the plan to invade the Andaman Islands. But FDR had promised Chiang!
Discussions with WSC over personnel. FDR had decided that day on Eisenhower for OVERLORD rather than Marshall, which AB approved of — Eisenhower now had ‘a certain amount of experience as a commander and was beginning to find his feet’. AB wanted Jumbo Wilson to be Supreme Commander for the Med, Alexander for Italy, Monty for OVERLORD.
On 6/12 FDR agreed to ditch the Andaman operation. So all resources could be thrown at Europe.
On 7/12 after dinner WSC asked for predictions on when Germany would fall. Marshall predicted March 1944 (i.e before OVERLORD), Dill ‘even money on March’, AB ‘gave 6 to 4 on March, reminder favoured March or November’. [Interesting they were all too optimistic.]
Macmillan infuriated AB by telling WSC to give the Med to Alexander (because he thought he could influence Alexander easier than Wilson).
Why must the PM consult everybody except those who can give him real advice!!
On 8/12 Smuts told AB he was worried about WSC: working too hard, exhausted, then ‘had to rely on drink to stimulate him again’, and was ‘beginning to doubt whether he would stay the course, that he was noticing changes in him’.
The next day AB had lunch with WSC in the garden. WSC complaining of feeling bad, pains. During lunch WSC kept starting a thought then … SMASH, he whacked a fly with his swatter and moved it to the mortuary in the corner of the table. The lunch was a ‘bad nightmare’. It turned out WSC was ‘on the verge of his go of pneumonia’ and Smuts had spotted it before ‘even Moran’, WSC’s doctor. AB said he felt ‘desperately anxious about him at that lunch’.
On 10/12 they visited the Valley of the Kings and Tutankhamen’s tomb ‘which thrilled me’.
On 11/12 they arrived in Tunis but landed at the wrong airport. WSC was sat on a suitcase on the tarmac in the cold. In a bad way and AB feared that if he went on to Italy it might ‘finish him off’. AB tried to stitch up crucial personnel issues with Ike before speaking to WSC then on to the ruins of Carthage, the same house as the previous visit (above). In the evening AB, after talking to Moran, tackled WSC:
I said that I did not think that he had any right to risk his health in this way when he had far more important matters in front of him connected with the war. I was beginning to make a little progress, and then I foolishly said, ‘And what is more, Moran entirely agrees with me.’ He rose up on his elbow in his bed, shook his fist in my face and said: ‘Don’t you get in league with that bloody old man!!!’
After that there was no alternative but to leave the matter alone for a bit. Thank heaven, God took a hand in the matter and the next day he was running a temperature!
The next day at 4am AB was woken in his room by a voice echoing through the room with a series of mournful ‘Hullo, Hullo, Hullo’.
AB: Who the hell is that?
It was WSC in his dragon dressing gown with a bad head seeking Moran.
AB took him to Moran’s room and returned to bed.
Next day AB spoke to Moran and asked him what he needed — people, x-rays etc. Moran told him. AB said they should send to Cairo now as there would be a delay. Moran asked not to in case he was wrong. AB — so what, we’ll just fly it all back.
On 13/12 AB headed for Italy alone and stood on European soil for the first time since leaving France four years earlier. The next day he flew to Monty’s HQ, and on the way flew low circles over Cannae to get a good look at the famous battlefield! AB depressed to find no energetic plans for capturing Rome pronto, ‘Monty is tired out and Alex fails to grip the show!’ He spent a few days touring and talking to officers including at Naples where he saw Monte Camino just after the battle. From there he saw Monte Cassino where there was soon a famous battle (which my grandfather fought in). [German officers organised the evacuation to Rome of priceless art, documents etc from the famous abbey before the battle and the abbey’s destruction.]
18/12 back to see WSC, much better, in Tunis. Details of commands finalised. And AB to be made a Field Marshal. AB heading home, WSC off to Marrakesh for a fortnight’s rest. AB did not tell WSC of his depressing impressions in Italy. That day AB’s PA found a turkey for Christmas in England, it was put on the plane and allowed to wonder around, occasionally held up to look out the window. Much discussion re the PM’s health and how to keep him calm.
20/12 Back to London after 5 weeks away and 13,000 miles by air. Overall, despite the nightmares AB was satisfied with the results. OVERLORD was settled. Andaman scrubbed. The southern France offensive was kept ‘more plastic’, i.e adjustable without affecting Italy much. Key positions were agreed. And he’d seen the problems in Italy on the ground. The turkey was liberated to potter around AB’s flat where it laid some eggs until AB took it home for Christmas with him.
22-29 Christmas at home, back to the War Office on 30/12. He had to tell Bedell Smith to stop robbing staff for OVERLORD, ‘I was responsible for the distribution of the Staff … I would have no string pulling’.
1944
4/1
Reference to weekly review of the ‘rocket or pilotless plane’ [cross reference later to RV Jones]. On 11/1 AB says bombing of the launch pads ‘is not going well’, bombing very inaccurate.
WSC was complicating matters sending orders from Marrakesh. Eisenhower as Supreme Commander came under the Combined Chiefs of Staff and orders for him had to be agreed by FDR too, so WSC interfering with other generals ‘could only annoy the Americans and raise their suspicions’.
An interesting account of a weekend with the Royal family who were friendly, happy, ‘devoid of all pomposity, stiffness or awkwardness’.
WSC back on 18/1.
19/1
Back to the increasingly depressing story, hours of meetings with WSC missing the point:
I don’t think I can stand much more of it. We waffled about with all the usual criticisms, all the usual optimist’s plans, no long term vision, and we settled nothing. In all his plans he lives from hand to mouth. He can never grasp a whole plan, either in its width (i.e all fronts) or its depth (long-term projects). His method is entirely opportunist, gathering one flower here another there! My God how tired I am of working for him! I had not fully realised how awful it is until I suddenly found myself thrown into it again after a rest!
On 24/1 Eisenhower proposed strengthening OVERLORD at the expense of southern France. This came from Monty.
Eisenhower has got absolutely no strategical outlook and he’s really totally unfit for the post he holds from an operational point of view. He makes up, however, by the way he works for good cooperation between allies. After lunch Monty came to see me and I had to tell him off for falling foul of both the King and [Secretary of State] in a very short time. He took it well, as usual.
In the evening WSC discussed Stalin’s iniquities in allowing Pravda to publish bogus information about England negotiating with Germany. WSC said:
Trying to maintain good relations with a communist is like wooing a crocodile, you do not know whether to tickle it under the chin or to beat it on the head. When it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile or preparing to eat you up.
27/1
AB went with Eisenhower to look at equipment for D-Day, ‘swimming tanks’, mine destroyers, flame throwers etc.
31/1
Bad news continues from Italy on the offensive.
3/2
Italy events mean no alternative to cracking on in Italy and dropping the southern France attack. On 7th Americans wired they disagreed so AB invited them over.
On 9th a row with WSC who didn’t want to impose a ban on visitors to the South Coast in anticipation of OVERLORD.
10/2
Long discussion with Eisenhower and Bedell Smith re requirements for OVERLORD. AB and Eisenhower on similar lines and Marshall had delegated decisions to Eisenhower.
14/2
AB told that MacArthur and Nimitz have never met, despite supposedly working together, plus King and Marshall frightened of MacArthur standing for Presidency! ‘All military plans shadowed by political backgrounds.’
Discussions with WSC re mad plans — ‘Now that I know him well episodes such as Antwerp and the Dardanelles no longer puzzle me!’
On 17/2 there was a long COS on post-war matters. AB ‘appalled’ by FO inefficiency. [Even in a war against Hitler the FO was appalling, SNAFU.]
19/2
Marshall interfered again pushing an attack in southern France, Eisenhower went along with it to please Marshall, Monty went along with it to please Eisenhower. ‘What a way to run a war!’ AB eased Eisenhower back to Plan A.
22/2
Marshall wanted the reserves in Italy deployed to southern France. Eisenhower scared of upsetting Marshall by disagreeing. AB unhappy with the proposed Burma campaign which he blames on FDR foolishly giving in to Chiang Kai-shek.
25/2
Menzies of SiS ticked off for WSC not being informed re Japanese main fleet moving to Singapore when the news was circulating in Whitehall. Heated arguments with WSC over Sumatra again. WSC called later inviting AB to dinner, AB thought it would be to sack him! A charming dinner discussing family, controlling Randolph, and the war, the Americans. AB hoped what he’d said about Sumatra had ‘soaked in’. No!
We were just at the very beginning of the most difficult period I had with Winston during the whole of the war. It was all connected with our future policy for the defeat of Japan, and need never have arisen had fate allowed us to look into the future and to realise that Japan would collapse as early as it did. Not being able to crystal gaze we had to plan a strategy for the British part in the final operation against Japan as soon as the defeat of Germany made it possible to deploy forces in this theatre.
[Two options. A. Operations based in India aimed at Burma, Singapore etc. B. Operations based in Australia coordinated with America.]
The first of these alternatives was the easiest to stage, but limited itself to the recapture of British possessions without any direct participation with American and Australian forces in the defeat of Japan. I felt that at this stage of the war it was vital that British forces should participate in direct action against Japan in the Pacific. First of all, from the Commonwealth point of view, to prove to Australia our willingness and desire to fight with them for the defence of Australia as soon as the defeat of Germany rendered such action possible. Secondly I felt that it was important that we should cooperate with all three services alongside of the Americans in the Pacific against Japan in the final stages of this war. I therefore considered that our strategy should aim of the liberation of Burma by South East Asia Command based on India, and the deployment of new sea, land and air forces to operate with bases in Australia alongside of forces in the Pacific.
There was a great deal to be said for all the various alternatives and combinations, but they must be discussed from the broadest aspect so as to arrive at a general strategic policy. The trouble was that Winston had now got all his desires centred onto the north tip of Sumatra, just in the same way as he had been set on Trondheim in the early days. He refused to look at any strategy or operation that did not contemplate the capture of the tip of Sumatra as its first stage, or indeed as its only stage, as I never got out of him what his subsequent stage would be. Such enquiries were classified as ‘long term projects that crippled initiative’. The situation was complicated by the fact that South East Asia Command was ready at all times to foster attacks on Sumatra, since this would at least lead to the allotment of forces to that command. The Americans, on the other hand, were not over anxious for our arrival in the Pacific to share their victories in the final stages and at a period when they were beginning to feel that they could probably defeat Japan on their own. They were more anxious for our cooperation with Chiang Kai-shek by the freeing of Burma.
28/2
More abuse from WSC for the army at Cabinet, everybody ‘hopeless’, AB temper fraying.
29/2
More bad news from Italy. WSC commented:
We hoped to land a wildcat that would tear out the bowels of the Boche. Instead we have stranded a vast whale with its tail flopping about in the water!
[Over February more reports in the diaries of German air rids in Whitehall than so far mentioned.]
3/3
AB discussed with the other chiefs a dangerous situation:
… the PM is trying at present to frame up the War Cabinet against the Chiefs of Staff Committee. It is all about the future Pacific strategy, it looks very serious and may well lead to the resignation of the Chiefs of Staff Committee. I am shattered by the present condition of the PM. He has lost all balance and is in a very dangerous mood.
The PM had made clear he would be bringing Eden, Attlee, Lyttelton and Leathers with him to discuss his latest paper with the COS.
None of them had given any deep thought to the matter, had, in fact, only scratched the surface of the problem, as was palpable from their remarks... Somehow the presence of these four ‘colleagues’ of Winston’s at those discussions always infuriated me and put me into a bad temper from the start. It was so palpable that they were brought along by him to support him, which they proceeded to do irrespective of the degree of lunacy connected with some of Winston’s proposals. It must be remembered that the war had been going on for several years and tempers were becoming distinctly frayed.
7/3
The PM’s paper on the Pacific is ‘the worst paper I have seen him write yet’, back to the northern tip of Sumatra.
On 8/3, Moran asked AB to help him stop WSC travelling again as his health wasn’t up to it, then Cabinet to discuss OVERLORD — ‘Winston in a hopeless mood incapable of taking any real decision’ — then the showdown at 10pm, with WSC plus the four ministers vs the COS, with ‘old Cunningham so wild with rage that he hardly dared let himself speak’:
The arguments of [the ministers] were so puerile that it made me ashamed to think they were Cabinet ministers! [This sentence censored by Bryant.] It was only too evident that they did not know their subject, had not read the various papers connected with it, and had purely been brought along to support Winston! And damned badly they did it too! I had a little difficulty in dealing with any of the arguments they put forward. Finally we had succeeded in getting the PM to agree to reconnaissances of Australia being carried out as a possible base for future action and we had got him to realise that his plans for the defeat of Japan must go beyond the mere capture of the tip of Sumatra.
On 17/3 WSC had a new plan to capture a new island near Sumatra, further discussions with Portal and Cunningham explaining why it wouldn’t work:
I began to wonder whether I was Alice in Wonderland, or whether I was really fit for a lunatic asylum. I am honestly getting very doubtful about his balance of mind and it just gives me the cold shivers. I don't know where we are or where we are going as regards our strategy, and I just cannot get him to face the true facts! It is a ghastly situation.
WSC wanting to go to Bermuda to see FDR even though the trip seemed pointless plus Moran warned it might kill him. Then further nightmare meetings, WSC belittling the army in front of the Cabinet and producing new mad plans for Sumatra, full of ‘false deductions and defective strategy’.
By 21/3 AB was considering all of the Chiefs resigning rather than accept WSC’s plans. On 23/3, with WSC wiring direct to commanders about Sumatra, AB recorded: ‘I feel like a man chained to the chariot of a lunatic! It is getting beyond my powers to control him.’
On 28/3 WSC was complaining of desperate tiredness.
If I had been told that Winston would be still Prime Minister of this country in 1955, I would have refused to believe it! I had been working closely with him practically since the start of the war, and had been watching him closely. I had seen a very definite deterioration during the last six months, and even a rapid decline since the last pneumonia attack. I began to feel at that time that the stupendous burden he had been carrying so valiantly throughout the war was gradually crushing him. With his marvellous vitality he carried on in a marvellous way but it had become more difficult than ever to work with him. When we take into account that I was also getting a little stale, it is to be marvelled that we did not finish with an almighty row before the end of the war!
First week of April, more pressure from D.C to close Italian operations and attack in south of France. AB pushing back: this will just lead to months of no pressure when we most need it to distract German reinforcements from northern France. Then connected arguments over the distribution of landing craft between Pacific and OVERLORD.
Difficult discussions over the bombing campaign, whether to focus on railway networks and thereby kill large numbers of French civilians, or elsewhere.
On 22/4 AB went for a week fishing in Scotland, exhausted and near the end of his tether.
On 1 May he returned to a conference of Empire PMs. WSC old — ‘I wonder if he lasts another three months’.
4/5 another awful PM meeting this time on provision of the synthetic ports, underwater obstacles etc. PM exhausted, meeting again meandered late into the early hours. On 7/5 WSC admitted he was dog tired, no longer jumped out of bed. Kind words to AB about his tremendous efforts which made an impression — not often getting such praise ‘[I] therefore treasured it all the more on the rare occasions’ and when he sometimes relaxed ‘you left him with the feeling that you would do anything within your power to help him carry the stupendous burden he had shouldered’.
A lot of time in May spent planning how to shift manpower from Europe to domestic needs and defeating Japan after Germany’s defeat. AB depressed by all the social affairs and speeches for the Imperial conference.
He refers to two hours bird watching in a hide as ‘like rubbing Aladdin's lamp, I was transplanted to a fairyland and returned infinitely refreshed and recreated’.
15/5 Final run through with Eisenhower and his team for OVERLORD plans.
The main impression I gathered was that Eisenhower was a swinger and no real director of thought, plans, energy or direction! Just a coordinator – a good mixer, a champion of inter-allied cooperation, and in those respects few could hold a candle to him. But is that enough? Or can we not find all qualities of a commander in one man? Maybe I’m getting too hard to please, but I doubt it.
An interesting consideration re Hitler… Would the Germans retreat from Italy leaving small forces to cover the retreat thus stranding many Allied forces in Italy while the action shifted to France? Marshall and others had made this argument. AB thought that it was a reasonable question to consider but pointed out — look at Stalingrad, Tunisia, the Dniepr River etc, Hitler never ordered sensible retreats, he always ordered forces to hang on to the bitter end even when it was foolish. He did the same in Italy. Continued operations in Italy therefore played the role AB had argued for so long, diverting critical German forces at the critical moment.
WSC had a habit of writing direct to members of the General Staff of the War Office. AB had told them all replies to the PM must be given to him for his signature. One day WSC tackled him — why do I get replies from you?
I informed him that as I was responsible for the General Staff I considered it my duty to answer minutes of his, that I should prefer him to address such minutes direct to me, but that even if he chose to ignore the chain of responsibility he would still get replies from me!
By now the pressure of OVERLORD was felt, 27/5:
The hardest part of bearing such responsibility is pretending that you are absolutely confident of success when you are really torn to shreds with doubt and misgivings! But when once decisions are taken the time for doubts is gone and what is required is to breathe the confidence of success into all those around. This is made doubly hard when subjected to the ravings of prima donnas in the shape of politicians, who seem to be incapable of having real faith in their own decisions!
31/5
The Pacific is a mess, Mountbatten ‘is quite irresponsible and tries to be loved by all which won't work’.
1/6
A long COS meeting to discuss Pacific strategy:
Not an easy paper when we have to steer clear between the rocks of Winston’s ramblings in Sumatra, Curtin’s subjugation to MacArthur, MacArthur’s love of the limelight, King’s desire to wrap all the laurels round his head, and last but not least real sound strategy! The latter may well get a bad position at the starting gate! My God how difficult it is to run a war and to keep military considerations clear of all the vested interests and political foolery attached to it!!
We also discussed the future of Greece and then came across the usual desire of the Foreign Office to support some high brow ideas as to future governments entirely unacceptable to the local people with utterly inadequate forces!
I am tired to death of our whole method of running war, it is just futile and heart breaking… [Foresees disaster in Burma with Mountbatten.] How I wish we had some more men with more vision. Or is it that I am very, very tired and becoming disheartened? If so it is time I left this job!
2/6
… Cunningham adopting the Admiralty attitude that a Supreme Commander ‘coordinates’ but does not command!! It will take several more generations before this outlook can be thoroughly eliminated.
D-Day was supposed to start on 4/5 June but the weather too bad. WSC tried to get himself on a cruiser to participate in the attack without telling AB — fortunately the King stopped him. The prolonged waiting was ‘shattering’ — ‘an empty feeling at the pit of one’s stomach and a continual desire to yawn’.
5/6
De Gaulle infuriating, AB advised he be left in Africa but the FO brought him over.
AB reflects on the prospects for D-Day and the potential for disaster:
It is very hard to believe that in a few hours the cross Channel invasion starts! I am very uneasy about the whole operation. At the best it will fall so very very far short of the expectation of the bulk of the people, namely all those who know nothing of its difficulties. At the worst it may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war…
I knew too well all the weak points in the plan of operations. First of all the weather on which we were entirely dependent; a sudden storm might wreck it all. Then the complexity of an amphibious operation of this kind, when confusion may degenerate into chaos in such a short time. The difficulty of controlling the operation once launched, lack of elasticity in the handling of reserves, danger of leakage of information with consequent loss of that essential secrecy. Perhaps one of the most nerve wracking experiences when watching an operation like this unroll itself is the intimate knowledge of the various commanders engaged. Too good a knowledge of the various weaknesses makes one wonder whether in the moments of crisis facing them they will not shatter one’s hopes.
To realise what it was like living through these agonising hours, the background of the last 3 years must be remembered. All those early setbacks, the gradual checking of the onrush, the very gradual turn of the defensive to the offensive, then that series of Mediterranean offensives alternately leading up to this final all important operation which started in the early hours of the next morning.
It’s interesting that AB was not sitting with Eisenhower or close to the action. Command was truly decentralised. AB remained in London watching life go on as usual as the battle raged. The news on 6th was mostly good, he thought, with bad news from the American Eastern Corps (V) failing in most places.
On 7th, the American V Corps seemed stuck.
We are not gaining enough ground and German forces are assembling fast. I do wish to heaven that we were landing on a wider front.
On 9th the news is better.
On 11 June a long meeting with the American Chiefs.
It was interesting to listen to Marshall explaining now why the Germans fought in central Italy!. He seemed to forget that I had given him all these arguments several months ago as a prediction of what I was convinced would happen.
Now the plan was to reach the Pisa-Rimini line in Italy then, finally, transferring troops to southern France to provide a front for French forces landing from Africa. (But see below.)
On 12/6 AB off with WSC to France. The scene on the French coast was ‘beyond description’, such was the hive of different activity.
It was a wonderful moment to find myself reentering France almost exactly 4 years after being thrown out for the second time, at St Nazaire. Floods of memories came back of my last trip of despair, and those long four years of work and anxiety at last crowned by the success of a re-entry into France…
They met Monty on the beach and drove inland. His thoughts wondered to 4 years ago:
I knew then that it would not be long before I was kicked out of France if I was not killed or taken prisoner, but if anybody had told me then that in 4 years time I should return with Winston and Smuts to lunch with Monty commanding a new invasion force I should have found it hard to believe it.
AB was astonished how normal life seemed on the coast — the crops growing, plenty of fat cattle etc.
And the French population did not seem in any way pleased to see us arrive as a victorious country to liberate France. They had been quite content as they were, and we were bringing war and desolation to the country.
WSC wanted to be involved in engaging German fire somehow, this was avoided. A long trip back to London.
13/6
Germans used the ‘pilotless planes’ [the V1s] for the first time but little damage.
14/6
WSC annoying AB again complaining about all the non-fighting equipment the Army needed — ‘dental chairs and YMCA institutions instead of bayonets’.
On 15/6 a tense discussion with Marshall re personnel issues — ‘I had to break off the conversation to save myself from rounding on him and irreparably damaging our relationship’. (A good example of the difficulties of personal relations at the apex of power — it’s extremely hard to discuss shuffling of key people and easy for relations to be destroyed. People, ideas, machines…)
Now the V1s were coming over in greater numbers, pressure for more attacks on launch sites. E.g on 19th a drone struck the Guards Chapel killing 60 including a friend of AB he was about to have lunch with, AB was picking up the invitation from his desk as he was told of his death. The drones perked up WSC’s spirits and he seemed 10 years younger.
27/6
Cabinet at which Morrison was in ‘a flat spin about the flying bombs and their affect on the population’:
After 5 years of war we could not ask them to stand such a strain etc etc… However, Winston certainly did not see eye to eye with him!
Morrison’s performance was a poor one, he kept on repeating that the population of London could not be asked to stand this strain after 5 years of war. He suggested that our strategy in France should be altered and that our one and only objective should be to clear the north coast of France. It was a pathetic performance, there were no signs of London not being able to stand it, and if there had been it would only have been necessary to tell them that for the first time in history they could share the dangers their sons were running in France and that what fell on London was at any rate not falling on them. Thank heaven Winston very soon dealt with him.
Further arguments with the Americans over Italy but now ‘the most marvellous intercept message’ from Hitler to Kesselring stating his determination to keep fighting in Italy as AB and others had predicted. The Germans were now subject to ‘political interference with military direction of operations’ and ‘it would be madness to fail to take advantage of it’. Pushing in Italy would keep these German forces pinned and unavailable to challenge OVERLORD. [Good example of how intelligence can shape war.] WSC also telegrammed to FDR stressing these points.
30/6
FDR’s reply — made clear that with the election approaching it was impossible to contemplate operations in the Balkans. Now the Americans owned the major strength in armed forces these struggles became ever harder.
4/7
Defences against V1s not working: fighters not fast enough, guns not hitting them, balloons get cables cut, attacking launching sites not working etc.
5/7
Considering reprisals against German towns as a deterrent:
Personally I am dead against it. The Germans fully realise that we are at present devoting nearly 50% of our effort in trying to stop these beastly bombs, added to which about 25% of London’s production is lost through the results of these bombs! They won’t throw away these advantages easily. I am afraid however that Winston’s vindictive nature may induce him to try reprisals. I hope we shall succeed in stopping him!
6/7
‘Quite the worst’ meeting with WSC:
He was very tired as a result of his speech in the House concerning the flying bombs, he had tried to recuperate with drink. As a result he was in a maudlin, bad tempered, drunken mood, ready to take offence at anything, suspicious of everybody, and in a highly vindictive mood against the Americans. In fact so vindictive that his whole outlook on strategy was warped. I began by having a bad row with him. He began to abuse Monty because operations were not going faster and apparently Eisenhower had said he was over cautious. I flared up and asked him if he could not trust his generals for 5 minutes instead of continuously abusing them and belittling them. He said that he never did such a thing. [AB reminded him of incidents in front of Cabinet.] He was furious with me but I hope it may do some good in the future.
Further rows about the Far East:
Attlee, Eden and Lyttleton were there, fortunately they were at last siding with us against him. This infuriated him more than ever and he became ruder and ruder. Fortunately he finished by falling out with Attlee and having a real good row with him concerning the future of India! We withdrew under cover of this smokescreen just on 2am having accomplished nothing beyond losing our tempers and valuable sleep!
… I think what infuriated me most was that there had not been a single word of approval or gratitude for the excellent work Monty had done in the handling of the land forces in this very difficult amphibious operation. And now he was starting off again with a string of abuse. I lost my temper and started one of the heaviest thunderstorms that we had! He was infuriated and throughout the evening kept shoving his chin out, looking at me, and fuming at the accusation that he ran down his generals.
At one moment he turned to Eden to ask him if there was any foundation to such an accusation. I am glad to say that Eden agreed with me and said that he thought that what worried the CIGS was that Winston expressed views about his generals in Cabinet meetings that might be misinterpreted by some Cabinet ministers who were not fully acquainted with the facts. This did not calm Winston much and the lightning and thunder continued to crash, and fortunately from my point of view finally settled on the unfortunate Attlee. [Eden also recorded a note about this ‘deplorable evening’. Cunningham diary: ‘There is no doubt that the PM was in no state to discuss anything. Very tired and too much alcohol.’]
8/7
AB discussed politics with Alexander who he thought was ‘entirely fooled’ by Macmillan.
I fear he has not even begun to understand what politics mean. It is just as well that he does not, a ‘soldier must not be politically minded’; but why should not the converse hold good? It seems as reasonable to state that a ‘politician must not be militarily minded’.
12/7
COS discussing occupation zones for Germany.
14/7
Another showdown over Far East strategy. AB tells WSC — we’ve gone through the two alternatives exhaustively, our advice is unanimous, we can’t go on with this indecision. WSC: I’ll decide within a week!
17/7
Another ‘desperate’ Cabinet: ‘Why cannot big men know when to close their career?’
19/7
A heavy V1 night. At one point AB threw himself under his bed. His living room window was blown in. The the PM enraged with Monty over a misunderstanding, AB flew out to see Monty and clear it up, drafting a diplomatic letter from Monty to WSC.
21/7
Heard from the radio of the assassination attempt on Hitler the previous day by von Stauffenberg (scuppered by terrible luck). AB wrote that he’d been expecting such events.
27/7
Discussions over whether Germany should be ‘dismembered or gradually converted to an ally to meet Russian threat of 20 years hence’. AB suggested the latter: Russia is not ‘European’, has vast resources, and ‘cannot fail to become the main threat in 15 years from now’, therefore build Germany up and ‘bring her into a federation of Western Europe… Not an easy policy and one requiring a super Foreign Secretary!’
Further problems between Eisenhower and WSC re Monty, exacerbated by the press blaming Monty for going slow so the Americans take most casualties. AB repeats that Eisenhower was great at allied cooperation but unsuited to be Supreme Commander. Bedell Smith has ‘brains, no military education in the true sense, and unfortunately suffers from a swollen head’.
In the last week of July, WSC annoying AB by wasting time in meetings with reminiscences. Discussion of an imminent new rocket bomb (V2). Morrison driving AB mad: ‘If England is to be ruled by that type of man, then we are sunk for a certainty.’
8/8
The nightmare gets worse.
I believe he has lost the power of giving a decision. He finds every possible excuse to avoid giving one. His arguments are becoming puerile, for instance he upheld this evening that an attack on the tip of Sumatra would force a withdrawal of Japanese forces in northern Burma and would liquidate our commitment in this area. We have conferred for 7 hours!!! with him today to settle absolutely nothing. Nor has he produced a single argument during the whole of that period that was worth listening to. I am at my wits end and can’t go on much longer!
On 9/8 AB spoke to Ismay to get him to draft a document based on the COS view but WSC’s ‘phraseology’ (classic bureaucratic warfare!).
Finally a compromise and decision of sorts on South East Asia that ‘saves something from the wreck’.
WSC off to Italy.
15/8:
Life has a quiet and peaceful atmosphere about it now that Winston is gone. Everything gets done twice as quickly, everybody is not on edge, one is not bombarded by a series of quite futile minutes and the whole machinery settles down to efficient smooth running. I feel that we have now reached the stage that for the good of the nation and for the good of his own reputation it would be a godsend if he could disappear out of public life. He’s probably done more for this country than any other human being has ever done, his reputation has reached its climax, it would be a tragedy to blemish such a past by foolish actions during an inevitable decline which has set in during the last year. Personally I have found him almost impossible to work with of late, and I am filled with apprehension as to where he may lead us next.
COS concerned with the Warsaw uprising, ‘the Russians appear to be purposely giving no assistance’.
17/8
AB driven mad by staff in the War Office claiming operations are impossible.
It is extraordinary how exhausting it is having to drive a plan through against opposition. First on the part of the PM and now on the part of those responsible for it in the [War Office]… The making of plans is just child’s play as compared to putting them into execution.
AMEN!!!
19-25/8 trip to Italy.
28/8
Paris is liberated, Rumania out of the war. ‘The Germans cannot last very much longer.’ Eisenhower proposing that he take over as commander of land forces as well as Supreme Commander. This is because of US press resenting Monty’s command. AB: it’s wrong for a Supreme Commander ‘to attempt the role of the supreme task on one level and one of the surfaces on the next level’.
On 29/9 AB flew out to discuss with Monty the problems with the Americans. WSC back from Italy ill again.
On 4/9 allied troops in Brussels and closing on Antwerp. AB and WSC off to Quebec on 5/9 by sea.
On the trip WSC repudiated agreements previously made. Perhaps still ill. He accused AB of working with the US Chiefs against him. ‘It was a ghastly time from which I have carried away the bitterest of memories.’
8/9
AB felt sorry for him:
He gave me the feeling of a man who is finished, can no longer keep a grip of things, and is beginning to realise it.
10/9:
I find it hard to remain civil. And the wonderful thing is that 3/4 of the population of the world imagine Winston Churchill is one of the Strategists of History, a second Marlborough, and the other 1/4 have no conception what a public menace he is and has been throughout this war! It is far better that the world should never know, and never suspect the feet of clay of that otherwise superhuman being. Without him England was lost for a certainty, with him England has been on the verge of disaster time and again.
And with it all no recognition hardly at all for those who help him except the occasional crumb intended to prevent the dog from straying too far from the table. Never have I admired and despised a man simultaneously to the same extent. Never have such opposite extremes been combined in the same human being…
My criticism of Winston’s wrath on that day was obviously unnecessarily hard, it should however be remembered that they were written at a moment of exasperation due to his attitude during the meetings we had held and desperation as to how I was to handle the conference in front of me with his continuous obstruction.
They arrive on 11/9, AB fed up with ‘the most ghastly hypocrisy’ of the official banquets, worried he is ‘getting soured against humanity as a whole’!
They actually get on well with the Americans re various troop movements.
14/9
Pug Ismay at the end of his tether, had drafted a resignation letter. AB thought Ismay handed it in, WSC ‘refused to take any notice of it’, but that it ‘relieved the tension’.
16/9
Things finalised after endless scenes with WSC, AB and others took off for a little fishing. Dill ill, ‘wasting away’. AB had no idea it was the last time they would meet.
22/9
Back to London by plane.
2/10
The FO hostile to the COS paper on the future of Europe: ‘Apparently the FO could not admit that Russia might one day become unfriendly.’ [Cf. 27/7/44, 2/10/44, 24/5/45.]
4/10
Over to Paris with Eisenhower, Monty et al. Monty has gone wrong in attacking Arnhem before Antwerp. (Arnhem is the setting for the movie A Bridge Too Far.) Ike ran the conference very well, there was a friendly spirit as well as open criticism and questioning of errors. Ike ‘nobly’ took the blame for Arnhem.
7/10
Off to Moscow via Naples, Cairo, then flying over Kharkov and River Dniepr, ‘this country that has been so much fought over’ (!). Landed in Moscow after 36 hour trip having had to use ‘emergency compressed air’ to get the undercarriage down properly.
10/10
A lunch banquet with Stalin lasting ‘3 solid hours’, the usual endless vodka toasts:
What had we done? Listening to half inebriated politicians and diplomats informing each other of their devotion and affection, and expressing sentiments very far detached from veracity. Are international friendships based on such frothy products of drunken orgies? If so God help the future!
12/10
So far discussions have focused on post-war matters and neglected how to finish the war.
A weird conversation with WSC who suddenly blurted out his suspicion that Monty was manoeuvring to get his Field Marshal’s baton at Buckingham Palace and ‘fill the Mall’.
‘Monty will NOT fill the Mall when he gets his baton!’ [NOT underlined in original]…
It was a strange streak of almost unbelievable petty jealousy of his part. But I had frequently noticed that he liked the limelight to concentrate on him and not to disperse on those that surrounded him. Those that got between him and the sun did not meet his approval. It was all a pretty human failing which somehow made to stand out all the greater and the very flatness of the surround made the [missing word] stand out all the sharper.
(Reminds me of Bismarck’s comment when asked why Wilhelm II was so hostile: ‘I am the thick shadow that stands between him and the sunshine of fame.’]
Over the next few days meeting with Stalin et al interspersed with trips to the Bolshoi for opera and ballet, and more ‘drunken orgies’. An interesting comment that the Embassy cannot build any social relations with locals because they won’t come for meals, won’t invite anybody to anything etc — a clear sign of how Stalin’s Terror affected everything. The Moscow equivalent of Selfridges had many things you couldn’t get in England and children’s toys were ‘far better than what you could raise in Hamleys’.
Russians planing to enter the war against Japan. Stalin impressed AB with his deep knowledge of the Soviet railways and logistics and implications for war against Japan.
Left for home on 19th, home on 22nd.
23/10
Food for thought from Russian trip:
One more of these vast experiments which humanity periodically carries out throughout the annals of history. Experiments which lead to much bloodshed, much upheaval, much suffering and finally when all is examined, some progress. In my mind Bolshevism, Nazism, Fascism etc all have their purpose; they all turn the wheel of destiny one or two more cogs forward. Forward towards the path of general progress. Humanity surges forward like the tide flowing. Successive waves of one or other ‘ism’ romp up the beach only to be sucked back almost to where they started from. But in that ‘almost’ lies the progress forward. It seems essential for humanity to subject itself to untold ordeals in order to achieve even slow progress towards perfection. The path of mankind in learning to ‘love its neighbours as itself’ is a thorny and rocky one. But for all that I have not the least doubt that mankind ultimately will reach the top rungs of this long and steep ladder.
31/10
Interesting reference to the tradeoff between a) bombing defences and therefore killing civilians and b) if ‘no’, for humanitarian reasons, then greater allied casualties.
1/11
Interesting reference to a discussion with P.J Grigg on the future of MI5 and ‘of the dangers attending its future should it fall into the wrong hands.’
5/11
Dill dead.
In my mind we owe more to Dill than to any other general for our final victory in the war. If it had not been for the vital part he played in Washington we should never have been able to achieve the degree of agreement in our inter-Allied strategy. The war might indeed have taken a very different course. I had unbounded admiration for him combined with the deepest of devotion, whilst Marshall had grown to admire, respect and like him in no small measure. He was therefore in an ideal position to play the part of intermediary between us, and to bring us together when our view points were so divergent that I saw no hope of agreement. Any success that I may have had in getting Marshall to finally accept our Mediterranean and Italian strategy were entirely due to Dill’s help. Repeatedly I heard him referred to as the best ambassador we had ever had in Washington.
The American opinion of him cannot be better exemplified than in his place of burial [Arlington National Cemetery]. And yet Winston would never recognise the services that Dill was rendering… I shall never be able to forgive Winston for his attitude towards Dill.
6/11
Left Cabinet with the feeling that ‘Winston is losing his authority in the cabinet’.
8/11
AB concerned that Eisenhower had, for political reasons (see above), been put in charge of land forces as well as Supreme Commander.
It is however a very serious defect in our organisation and one that may have evil repercussions on the strategy of the war. I do not like the layout of the coming offensive, and doubt whether we [will] even reach the Rhine, it is highly improbable that we should cross over before the end of the year.
AB and Monty thought Eisenhower was dispersing forces too widely.
10/11
AB with WSC to Paris. WSC said the last time he’d been to the Quai d’Orsay the French were burning archives ready to depart in 1940.
Ceremonies in Paris. AB spoke to some Resistance figures. Most did not survive four months before the Gestapo caught them. They were very down on De Gaulle — he’d evacuated his family to London at the start of the war then followed them, and from his safe position had the impertinence to say ‘Je suis la France’ — ‘they were very bitter and had little use for him.’
More concerns re Eisenhower attacking everywhere at once and losing forces unnecessarily instead of focused attacks at critical points. On 13/11 AB saw a march of the Foreign Legion battalion:
The grandest assembly of real fighting men that I have ever seen, marching with their heads up as if they owned the world, lean, hard looking men, carrying their arms admirably and marching with perfect precision. They disappeared into the darkness leaving me with a thrill and the desire for a division of such men.
16/11
First mention of the atomic bomb discussed in COS, oddly in the context of discussions with Anderson, the Chancellor, about research in Germany.
20/11
Eisenhower ‘completely fails’ as Supreme Commander and ‘just does nothing’, ‘the war is drifting in a rudderless condition’.
22/11
Duncan Sandys ‘does not improve on acquaintance but no doubt possesses all the necessary qualities for a successful political career!’
24/11
At the end of COS AB put the secretaries out and retained only Ismay.
I then put before the meeting my views on the very unsatisfactory state of affairs in France, with no one running the land battle. Eisenhower, though supposed to be doing so, is detached and by himself with his lady chauffeur on the golf links at Reims - entirely detached from the war and taking practically no part in the running of the war! Matters got so bad lately that a deputation of Whitely, Bedell Smith and a few others went up to tell him that he must get down to it and RUN the war, which he said he would. Personally I think he is incapable of running the war even if he tries. [Last sentence cut by Bryant but it still caused offence in US.]
Decided that AB would speak to WSC about it and try to bring off Bradley being made commander of land forces. There was a plan to discuss it with Marshall.
On 28/11 AB spoke to WSC and said the strategy of attacking all along the front was ‘sheer madness’ and explained the Eisenhower problem. Agreed to bring Marshall over to discuss. Discussions on ammunition production ‘to meet possibility of war dragging on late into 1945’.
2/12
A row — WSC wanted to send a message to Eisenhower revealing that Monty had told AB various things, AB angry and warned WSC he would stop sharing things! AB thought WSC annoyed that the press had given Ike and Monty some limelight.
Early December lots of concern about chaos in Greece.
12/12
Meeting with WSC in bed, unable to get him to focus on Monty’s letter and fixated on Greece, left ‘disgusted’, War Cabinet on Greece wasted an hour and a half discussing ‘wether the Archbishop should be appointed Regent’. AB returned to War Office then was summoned back for another Cabinet ‘which I refused to attend’!
At 6pm met Ike and Tedder with WSC. Ike wanted a double advance into Germany, north of the Rhine and by Frankfurt.
I disagreed flatly with it, accused Ike of violating principles of concentration of force, which had resulted in his previous failures. I criticised his future plans and pointed out the impossibility of double invasion with limited forces he has got. I stressed the importance of concentrating on one thrust. I drew attention to the fact that with his limited forces any thought of attack on both fronts could only lead to dispersal of effort. Quite impossible to get the PM to even begin to understand the importance of the principles involved. Half the time his attention was concentrated on the possibility of floating mines down the Rhine!!! He cannot understand a large strategical concept and must get down to detail! Ike also quite incapable of understanding real strategy. To make it worse Tedder talks nothing but nonsense in support of Ike.
Then dinner with the two and others but ‘I got no further in getting either Winston or Ike to see that their strategy is fundamentally wrong.' Also discovered that Ike did not hope to cross the Rhine before May.
He was so depressed he considered resigning. The next day WSC said that he felt he’d had to support Ike but AB’s arguments had made some impression on WSC. WSC asked AB to present the situation to the War Cabinet which was shocked by the news of May for the crossing of the Rhine.
18/12
News of German counteroffensives. AB worried that if mishandled it could add 6 months to the war.
Runstedt had proved how faulty Ike’s dispositions and organisations were. Spread out over a large front with no adequate reserves and no land force Commander to immediately take charge, we shall see that in his attempts to stop the Germans he was compelled to withdraw troops from Strasbourg and in doing so to almost create a crisis in the de Gaulle government. It was a bold stroke on the part of the Germans and had it not been for Monty’s prompt action might well have scored a definite success. As it was Eisenhower was temporarily thrown off his balance. On the other hand there can be no doubt that, after having been keyed up for this offensive by Runstedt, a definite reaction affected the German morale as a result of its failure.
On 20th, bad news from Germany, AB saw WSC, the worse for too much brandy, and got him to wire Ike suggesting that Monty be put in charge of the whole Northern Wing while Bradley ran the South. Ike agreed (possibly had already done this).
By the last week of December better news, hopes that the offensive will be contained and the Germans finished off. Monty too keen on telling Ike ‘I told you so’! AB very frustrated with Eisenhower, a ‘hopeless commander’. WSC rushed to Greece which had absorbed 80k troops and was a giant mess:
We shall eventually have to withdraw out of Greece, and she will then become as communistic as her close neighbours consider desirable. Meanwhile the campaign in Italy stagnates.
1945
The new year starts with a familiar torrent of PM minutes ‘all of a futile nature’.
2/1
‘A poisonous day.’
WSC trying to send Alex to Moscow when he’s supposed to be running the war in Italy. No clear purpose. Wild ideas for new deployments.
On 8/1 he had to discuss with WSC a press interview in which Monty had claimed a lot of credit and made the Americans look bad. (This implies they did not have some sort of review of such interviews whereby an official could strike a pen through lines before they were published, which seems amazing!? Or did someone just fail?)
Morrison complaining again about the rockets — ‘If there are many like him in England we deserve to lose the war'!’
Alexander was ‘completely lost in this damned Greek business’, relying on Macmillan as ‘his confidential adviser on all matters including military ones’. It’s ‘depressing’ to see how Alexander’s ‘deficiency of brain allows him to be dominated by others’. (Given how damning AB is of Alexander it’s depressing he was promoted to such a position. He was extremely charming which maybe explains it.)
My God how difficult war is to run owing to the personalities one has to handle… But to handle them you must be young and full of vigour and enthusiasm, whereas every day I feel older, more tired, less inclined to face difficulties, less capable to face problems.
On 19/1 he assured WSC that although he had opposed the original venture in Greece and it was ‘a commitment which we had incurred against my military advice’, AB accepted that they were now committed and had to stay until they could hand over to Greek forces.
20/1
AB reflected on the role of the COS:
It is a strange thing what a vast part the COS takes in the running of the war and how little it is known or its functions appreciated. The average man in the street has never heard of it. Any lime light for it could not fail to slightly diminish the PM’s halo! This may perhaps account for the fact that he has never yet given it the slightest word of credit in public!…
It is not astonishing that nobody knew much about the functions of the COS Committee in war, since this was the first war to be fought since this organisation was brought into being between the wars. When war started it soon became the Central Battle Headquarters for all fronts, with the trinity of the 3 Chiefs of Staff acting in the capacity of a Supreme Commander of all fronts, and served by the Joint Planning Staff acting as an Operational Branch, and the Joint Intelligence Staff representing the Intelligence Branch. Both these staffs were integrated at all levels with various Ministries concerned... This organisation dealt with the day to day reports and messages. It was up to the Chiefs of Staff to think out what theatres of war were necessary, what the allocation of forces should be for them and to prepare the plans for the operations in that theatre. All this work had to be done in close consultation with the Government, and Government approval had to be obtained in all major issues. Finally it was up to the COS to issue the actual orders or directives to the Commanders in each theatre. Where Supreme Commanders were concerned on inter-Allied fronts, then the matters were carried up to the Combined Chiefs of Staff for their decision, which again had to obtain approval of their respective Governments. It will be seen, therefore, that the COS organisation had grown into a very effective form of War HQ in close contact with the Government and in control of all operations and all theatres. Even now many years after the war, the country as a whole does not realise the value of this War HQ, which grew out of the COS Committee during the war.
On 22/1 AB complained about the appalling waste of time in Cabinet meetings and on the 23rd he was really fed up:
I don’t feel that I can stand another day working with Winston, it is quite hopeless, he is finished and gone, incapable of grasping any military situation and unable to give a decision.
After the war he said that the abuse in the diary may give ‘a false impression’ of his relations and feelings: he always retained ‘the same unbounded admiration and gratitude for what he had done in the early years of the war’, and ‘there were always feelings of real affection’:
In reading these diaries it must be remembered that I had a long and trying time with him and that the writing of this diary represented the only safety valve that I had to pent up feelings of irritation which I could share with no one else.
Issues around Polish forces and the postwar situation were looming.
29/1 off to Malta for a conference. Eisenhower had sent ‘awful’ documents. Bedell Smith largely agreed with AB. They decided to adopt BS’s statement and ‘ignore Ike’s appreciation’. Then more confusion as BS wired Ike and got a wire back, both confusing things more.
He had to have a chat with Alexander and tell him ‘some of us had doubts as to whether Macmillan or Alexander was Supreme Commander of the Mediterranean!’
This had I think the required effect. But, my God, how I loathe being unpleasant in this way. [Cf. my repeated point about high performance — it requires a constant war against natural entropy viz the quality of people, but this is very costly therefore very rare. This pops up throughout these diaries.]
He attended a large dinner party in Nelson’s old headquarters and felt ‘swept off into the old ages imagining him here with his romance and his wars’.
The next day, 1/2, rows with Marshall over Eisenhower’s plans. AB forced to accept decisions he did not like because America now had most of the forces in play. AB’s view was that Marshall didn’t understand the issues therefore simply wanted to back Ike and thought it his duty.
On 2/2 AB suffered what he called ‘one of the worst blows I had during the war’. His ADC, Barney, was killed in a plane accident. Barney had been with him since France and Dunkirk. They had been together throughout and Barney lived at AB’s London flat. (There are references to this blow over future weeks and to AB helping Barney’s wife.)
On 3/2 onto Crimea for the Yalta conference. AB doesn’t record much of the political discussion about the future of Europe. He focused on military cooperation to finish the war. There’s an interesting reference to FDR not wanting to add someone to Ike’s team for fear the press in America would portray it in terms of the Ardennes failures, a very rare example I’ve noticed of the modern phenomenon of fear of the media directly influencing crucial decisions. AB chaired military discussions with the Russians and Americans. FDR told WSC that the Americans would only stay in Germany for two years after the end of the war. On 7/2 AB and others looked at Sebastopol, retraced old battles from 1855, and saw old graves next to new ones from the recent fighting.
The conference ended with the usual drunken dinner which made AB bored and depressed and he had to sit next to Harriman ‘who annoys me intensely’. Disparaging remarks about FDR and WSC ‘meandering about’ wasting time. Dinner with Marshall boring him, WSC ‘wanderings on useless strategy’, and Alexander ‘displaying the smallness of his vision and conception of war’ (!) Clearly by now, as AB writes, he was sick. of the war and listening to meetings. He gave Alexander another ticking off about being influenced by Macmillan.
On the way home via Malta AB went to the cemetery and paid a wreath by Barney’s grave. Back to London on 11/2 after a scary flight home himself where the pilot got lost.
On 20/2 usual weekly meting with JIC. Signs of ‘small cracks’ in the German fighting machine but still ‘no indication of a general cracking up’, still impossible to say how long it may last.
Ominous signs for the Poles, AB shuddering at the thought of likely developments.
22/2
Monthly meeting on V2s, AB concluded that various schemes didn’t work, the only answer was clearing the area from which they were launched and this was not possible yet.
On 1/3 Churchill was contemplating what might happen if Hitler tried to surrender.
2/3
Over to France with PM. Eisenhower ‘most impressive’ in his evening meeting with staff. The battle going ‘wonderfully well’ and signs of ‘decay setting in in the German Army’' — shows fast how things can change since 20/2.
On 3/3 WSC took the convoy off to the Siegfried Line to urinate on it having told the photographers it was ‘one of the operations connected with this great war which must not be reproduced graphically’. They complied.
6/3
Long talk with Ike — ‘a most attractive personality and at the same time a very very limited brain from a strategic point of view’. Ike can only see the worst side of Monty. Back to London and Cabinet — total waste of time, ‘How ministers can afford to waste time in this way in times of war passes my understanding’ and ‘Winston is by far the worst offender’. [This is one way in which covid 2020 was better in a sense. Meetings dominated by ministers were almost by definition a waste of time and often actively damaging, as the meetings were scripted and the ministers rarely up to speed etc. But we were spared three hour cabinet meetings.]
7/3
Morrison again complaining about the rockets and seems to forget that theatres, cinemas, restaurants, night clubs, pubs etc have been ‘in full swing for the last few years and very little affected by enemy action’ (interesting insight into how London felt).
Tough decisions about shipping, oil etc to balance continued military operations and civilian suffering in Europe.
References to feelers put out by German commanders for peace deals, representatives sent to Switzerland for secret meetings. Looks ‘pretty fishy’ and not promising. (Alan Dulles was heavily involved in this and it was part of the plot for the brilliant Soviet TV series 17 Moments in Spring which you should watch if you want to understand modern Russia.)
20/3
Interesting reference to dissent in COS on ‘question of committee for research and developments’ [NB. cross check with RV Jones book].
22/3
Back to France with WSC, very annoying, he’ll ‘endanger his life unnecessarily’ and cause chaos.
23/3
With Monty in Germany, a walk in the moonlight with WSC discussing the ‘momentous moment of the crossing of the Rhine’. They went back over earlier struggles, discussing AB’s appointment and the years since.
He was in one of his very nicest moods and showed appreciation for what I had done for him in a way in which he had never before.
Worrying messages from Russia given their fears of a separate peace (cf. above).
24/3
They watched the attack. AB now ‘certain’ the end is near and the Germans may pack up any day.
25/3
By now the strategy was simply push relentlessly wherever they could ‘until he crumples’. Eisenhower wrote in his Memoirs that AB said to him that day that he was glad he had ‘stuck by your guns’ as ‘you were completely right’. AB says: No, I did not say that as ‘I am still convinced that he was completely wrong’ in attacking over such a wide area instead of concentrating, as proved by Runstedt’s successful counterattack which retarded victory — but the situation by now was completely different from when they’d been arguing about it.
As they pottered about they suddenly found themselves within 100m of enemy shells amid snipers and decided to get the PM away, which upset him.
AB watched Monty’s evening meeting, ‘the modern form of the general and his gallopers’.
26/3
Back to London after WSC had also urinated in the Rhine.
AB thought WSC ‘would really have liked to be killed on the front at this moment of success’.
29/3
AB sick of the sight of WSC, the strain of years is taking effect, fed up of the long meandering discussions missing the point. He’d ‘reached the end of my tether’ and criticisms of him in this period should be read with this in mind.
Eisenhower also annoying with ‘ridiculous’ wires to Stalin so badly worded nobody could understand it.
On 3/4 AB refers to a lot of speeches in Cabinet as ‘greeting and signs of approval!’, a good way of putting it — ‘chimp politics’, the political equivalents of grooming, gang violence etc, are often more important than any ‘rational’ explanation for action.
12/4
One of the worst minutes from WSC ‘I have ever seen’:
I can only believe that he must have been quite tight when he dictated it. [Previous sentence removed for Bryant version.] It brought out all his worst qualities and was based on a complete misappreciation of existing organisation.
All sorts of errors and confusions in it about who was reporting to whom.
But then matters such as ‘chain of command’ and ‘loyalty to one’s superiors’ are unknown factors to him!! My God! how little the world at large knows what his failings and defects are! And thank heaven they don’t or we should not be where we are now!
Discussion with the SoS about staying as CIGS until the end of the year. (No mention of FDR’s death.)
20/4
Russians moving again, still likely to be ‘several more weeks’ of war but ‘Hitler’s suicide might well bring the end on rapidly’.
2/5
Hitler’s death reported on midnight news. [Again implies AB heard momentous events from BBC, not from a private message.']
After longing for this news for the last six years and wondering whether I should ever be privileged to hear it, when I finally listened to it I remained completely unmoved. Why? I do not know. I fully realised that it was the real full stop to the many long chapters of this war, but I think that I have become so war weary with the continual strain of the war that my brain is numbed, and incapable of feeling intensely.
Germany crumbles. On 4/5 Monty met Keitel who surrendered unconditionally. Later that day a COS in No10 with WSC.
He thanked us all very nicely and with tears in his eyes for all we have done in the war and all the endless work we had put in ‘from El Alamein to where we are now’. He then shook hands with all of us.
7/5
Trouble with the Russians. WSC discussing pros and cons of an election in June. ‘We’ (I assume he meant the COS) stressed the cons from the military point of view, it could ‘lead only to dispersal of effort which would be better concentrated onto the war’.
It’s the end:
I can’t feel thrilled, my main sensation is one of infinite mental weariness! A sort of brain lethargy which refuses to register highlights… The most acute feeling is one of deep depression such as I have experienced at the end of the strain of each Combined Chiefs of Staff Conference.
8/5, VE Day
Usual COS in morning. Battled through crowds to the Palace. The King gave a nice speech pointing out how few outside the room understood the importance of the COS. The PM and COS stood on a balcony outside the Home Office before a vast crowd. Back to work! PJ Grigg’s wife was in the office and said to AB that nobody in the crowd realised that AB was the man who’d done more than anybody to win the war, ‘tell Lady Brookie from me’.
There is no doubt that the public has never understood what the Chiefs of Staff have been doing in the running of this war. On the whole the PM has never enlightened them much, and has never once in all his speeches referred to the Chiefs of Staff or what they have been doing in the direction of the war on the highest plane. It may be inevitable, but I do feel that it is time that this country was educated as to how wars are run and how strategy is controlled. The whole world has now become one large theatre of war, and the Chiefs of Staff represent the Supreme Commanders, running the war in all its many theatres, regulating the allocation of forces, shipping, munitions, relating plans to resources available, approving or rejecting plans, issuing directives to the various theatres. And most difficult of all handling the political aspect of this military action, and coordinating with our American allies.
It is all far less spectacular than the winning of battles by commanders in the field, and yet if the COS make any errors the commanders in the field will never be in a position to win battles. Their actions are not in the limelight, indeed most of the time they are covered by secrecy. We therefore find the COS working and working incessantly, shouldering vast responsibilities, incurring great risks without the country ever realising we were at work. It has been a wonderful experience, of never ending interest. At times the work and the difficulties to be faced have been almost beyond powers of endurance. The difficulties with Winston have been of almost unbearable proportions, at times I have felt that I could not possibly face a single other day. And yet I would not have missed the last 3½ years of struggle and endeavour for anything on earth.
I remember the night Winston offered me the job of CIGS in the large smoking room at Chequers, he went out of the room shortly afterwards. I was so overcome that my natural instinct was, when left alone in the room, to kneel on the sofa and pray to God for his assistance in my new task. I have often looked back, during the last 3½ years, to that prayer and thanked God for the way he listened to me and provided me with the help I had asked for, and without which I should have floundered in the first year. I am not a highly religious individual according to many people’s outlook. I am however convinced that there is a God all powerful looking after the destiny of this world. I had little doubt about this before the war started, but this war has convinced me more than ever of this truth. Again and again during the last 6 years I have seen His guiding hand control and guide the destiny of this world toward that final and definite destiny which He has ordained. The suffering and agony of war in my mind must exist to gradually educate us to the fundamental law of ‘loving our neighbour as ourselves’. When that lesson has been learned, then war will cease to exist. We are however many centuries from such a state of affairs. Many more wars, and much suffering is required before we finally learn our lesson. However humanity in this world is still young and there are still many millions of years to run during which high perfection will be attained. For the present we can do no more than go on striving to improve more friendly relations towards those that surround us.
With these reflections I must leave behind the German war and turn my energies during my few remaining days [as CIGS] towards the final defeat of Japan.
He took the next day off with his wife.
Over the next days the main issue was Tito and trouble with Stalin. De Gaulle causing trouble in Syria and infuriating the Italians.
In fact the vultures of Europe are now crowding round and quarrelling over bits of the Austro-German-Italian carcass which they are endeavouring to tear off. Meanwhile they gather round a table in San Francisco to discuss how to establish universal peace! [The United Nations Conference on International Organisation was held in San Francisco 25 April to 26 June.]
WSC meandering, ‘when the eagles are silent the parrots begin to jabber’ (Tito and de Gaulle!), the Germans should dig up the mines they laid, ‘pigs are used to find olives’. No PM, truffles.
In the afternoon a meeting about the security of MI5 and 6 — worrying!
24/5
No clarity on whether America planning invasion or encirclement of Japan. (The Trinity Test was not until 16 July.)
Meeting with the planners on the possibility of war with Russia.
The idea is of course fantastic and the chances of success quite impossible. There is no doubt that from now onwards Russia is all powerful in Europe.
Cf. 2/10/44 above.
This paper [produced earlier after COS was asked to look at this issue] had created a considerable stir in the Foreign Office who considered it was very remiss of us to look upon our present ally as our probable future enemy. We might even have been asked to withdraw this paper had we not asked for an interview with Anthony Eden, who approved our outlook. Now only a few weeks later, Winston had come to us expressing his anxiety at seeing ‘that Russian bear sprawled over Europe’, and instructing us to examine from the military point of view the possibility of driving him back to Russia before the Americans and ourselves demobilised our forces! I asked him if he took charge of all the political aspects of launching a war on our ally! He said we could leave that aspect and concentrate on the military problem…
The results of this study made it clear that the best we could hope for was to drive the Russians back to about the same line the Germans had reached. And then what? Were we to remain mobilised indefinitely to hold them there?
28/5
Meeting with WSC and Eden about the situation with France and Syria. WSC thinks we should steer clear, ‘watch our own interests and let the French and Syrians cut each other’s throats.’ AB agrees. If we get involved now ‘we shall have to shoot up both sides to stop the fight’. AB wants the FO to unite with the US State Department to ‘set about de Gaulle as he deserves’!
5/6
Meeting with JIC over ‘the organisation of a new Central Intelligence Board’ — the plan ‘does not go far enough’ but we need to decide ‘whether we are to have a Defence Ministry’.
11/6
WSC very gloomy about Russia — they’re further west than they’ve ever been except once (after the defeat of Napoleon) and ‘all powerful in Europe … they could march across the rest of Europe and drive us back into our island’. The Americans are going home.
He finished up by saying that never in his life had he been more worried by the European situation that he was at present.
On 12/6 he saw Eisenhower give a few speeches and was impressed — ‘I had never realised that Ike was as big a man until I heard his performance today!’
The election is producing bad decisions (‘vote catching’) and Laski is interfering with Attlee’s travel to the Big Three meeting which has to be postponed.
Heaven help democracies if they must have elections in war!
21/6
Trouble with the Planners over Japan — ‘It is exhausting driving people on to make them overcome difficulties!’
28/6
He drove out to Bletchley (‘the Park’) to thank the 400 workers on behalf of the COS.
29/6
AB told WSC he wanted to go by the end of the year. WSC replied that he was ‘quite young’ and was needed to reorganise the army.
3/7
JIC discussing Tizard and the new plans for science and technology R&D postwar. (NB. Check against RV Jones book.)
5/7
He refers to his wife voting but not himself, did he think it improper somehow?
10/7
JIC discussing how long Japan might hold out. (Clearly no discussion of imminent nuclear attack. How widespread was knowledge of this in Whitehall? We now know Stalin knew much more about this via espionage than ~100% of Whitehall, but how extensive was this knowledge among this 1%?)
15/7
Off to Potsdam.
On 16th he walked around the Chancellery and saw the chaos of the last weeks of the Reich, including Hitler’s writing table overturned. The population ‘did not look too thin but on the whole pathetic and surly’. On 17th he looked at some of the old Prussian castles such as Sans Souci which seem to have survived unscathed. (Perhaps if archives such as the Prussian Foreign Office’s had been kept there instead of Berlin they’d have survived?)
Still meetings discussing invasion of Japan assuming it will obviously have to happen.
On 19th he went down into Hitler’s bunker, saw where the Goebbels family had died (the parents had killed all their children then topped themselves). He was also shown where Hitler’s body had supposedly been buried and was told by the Russian in charge that ‘he considered that Hitler was now in Argentina, and that Eva Braun had never died… I wonder if the truth will ever be known.’ (In fact Hitler and EB’s bodies were burnt and buried. A special Russian SMERSH team found them and unburied them on Stalin’s orders. Eventually, after Soviet agencies changed their minds several times over decades (while lying to the west), part of Hitler’s skull and some other things, including parts of the sofa on which Hitler died, were brought back to Moscow where my old tutor, Norman Stone, saw them in the early 1990s after bribing some KGB officers. He tried to persuade Oxford to buy many such things amid the chaos but obviously Oxford had lots of committee meetings and missed the chance.)
On 22nd he tried a little fishing but it had been ruined by SS troops fishing with grenades. Later that day he missed a ‘minor tornado’ which had lifted roofs (I’ve never thought of tornados happening in Europe but never realised this until now!?).
23/7
WSC was trying to agree a new Lend Lease deal with Truman. Lunch 1330 to discuss the first successful test of an atomic bomb:
I was completely shattered by the PM's outlook! He had seen the reports of the American results of the new TA [‘Tube Alloys’] secret explosive experiments [i.e the atomic bomb] which had just been carried out in the States. He had absorbed all the minor American exaggerations, and as a result was completely carried away! It was now no longer necessary for the Russians to come into the Japanese war, the new explosive alone was sufficient to settle the matter. Furthermore we now had something in our hands which would redress the balance with the Russians! The secret of this explosive, and the power to use it, would completely alter the diplomatic equilibrium which was adrift since the defeat of Germany! Now we had a new value which redressed our position (pushing his chin out and scowling), now we could say if you insist on doing this or that, well we can just blot out Moscow, then Stalingrad, then Kiev, then Kuibyshev [Samara], Karkhov, Stalingrad, Sebastopol etc etc. And now where are the Russians!!
I tried to crush his over-optimism based on the results of our experiment, and was asked with contempt what reason I had for minimising the results of these discoveries. I was trying to dispel his dreams and as usual he did not like it. But I shudder to feel that he is allowing the half baked results of one experiment to warp the whole of his diplomatic perspective! During lunch Anthony Eden came in hot from his discussion with Molotov and Byrnes, I am afraid that he added to my gloom. Delightful as he is in my opinion he always seems to just miss the point.
In the evening AB reminded Stalin of the latter’s toast at Yalta to soldiers, always forgotten when peace comes.
It is interesting to note Winston’s reaction, and my counter reactions to the atomic bomb news. Winston's appreciation of its value in the future international balance of power was certainly far more accurate than mine. But what was worrying me was that with his usual enthusiasm for anything new, he was letting himself be carried away by the very first and rather scanty reports of the first atomic explosion. He was already seeing himself capable of eliminating all the Russian centres of industry and population, without taking into account any of the connected problems, such as delivery of the bomb, production of bombs, possibility of Russia also possessing such bombs etc etc. He had at once painted a wonderful picture of himself as the sole possessor of these bombs and capable of dumping them where he wished, thus all powerful and capable of dictating to Stalin! This attitude brought out all my reactionary sentiments which led me into a failure to fully realise the importance of the new discovery.
(Good for AB in admitting why his initial reaction was faulty.)
By now AB was suffering from ‘extreme exhaustion’ and feeling totally ‘flat’. He now had to read every paper 2 or 3 times to absorb it.
On 26/7 he was back in London to find Labour had won a landslide. AB says he had advised WSC not to call the election then. (I’ve read somewhere Beaverbrook advised it?) AB very sad to lose his SoS.
It is probably all for the good of England in the long run, any government in power during the next year is not going to last long. But what a ghastly mistake to start elections at this period in the World’s History! May God forgive England for it.
27/7
Farewell to his SoS, AB was ‘genuinely fond of him and very sad at our parting’, AB had come to ‘appreciate his high qualities’. Then to No10. AB could not say much to WSC ‘for fear of breaking down’.
The thought that my days of work with Winston had come to an end was a shattering one. There had been very difficult times, and times when I felt I could not stand a single more day with him, but running through all our difficulties a bond of steel had been formed uniting us together. We had been so closely linked together in this vast struggle that it would have been impossible for us to go on striving together unless a deep bond of friendship had existed; had this not been the case there would have been only one alternative, that of parting. No doubt Winston must frequently have felt that he could stand me no longer, and I marvel even now that as a result of some of our differences he did not replace me. There are few things that can bind two individuals more closely than to be intimately connected in a vast struggle against overwhelming odds and to emerge on top of all.
On reading these diaries I have repeatedly felt ashamed of the abuse I had poured on him, especially during the latter years. It must, however, be remembered that my diary was the safety valve and only outlet for all my pent up feelings. Feelings that had been engendered through friction generated from prolonged contacts of very tired individuals. During the last years Winston had been a very sick man, with repeated attacks of pneumonia, and very frequent attacks of temperature. This physical condition together with his mental fatigue accounted for many of the difficulties in dealing with him, a factor which I failed to make adequate allowance for in my diary. I shall always look back on the years I worked with him as some of the most difficult and trying ones in my life. For all that I thank God that I was given the opportunity of working alongside of such a man, and of having my eyes opened to the fact that occasionally such supermen exist on this earth.
He had also lost PJ Grigg, his SoS:
It would have been hard to find a man with whom I would sooner have worked. The position of a CIGS in war is a difficult one, he has to serve two masters. According to the Bible such a procedure is impossible. I should qualify this statement by stating that with exceptional masters this may be possible. If it was possible for me during the war this was thanks to the attitude of one of my masters, the [Secretary of State], and in spite of the fact that the other master, the PM, did not always contribute to the smooth running of the tripartite set up. In my early days I did sense some degree of suspicion on the part of P.J. concerning my activities on the COS committee and my direct contacts with the PM. However from the moment that I had gained his confidence, and assured him that he would always be kept informed of all my activities in the service of my second master, I received his unstinted help and invaluable advice in all my work. Gifted with one of the quickest brains I have met, it was an easy task to keep him in the picture even went time was short. I always knew when consulting him that I should get the most valuable advice. Above all I found that his nature was such that the more one saw of him the more one realised his sterling qualities of unflinching straightness. During the years I worked with him I grew to appreciate his qualities and developed a genuine deep affection for him which made our parting difficult.
31/7
The FO as usual hopeless on Greece. They’d originally asked for 10k troops, AB had said they needed at least 80k, he’d been told to pipe down as it was a political matter, and they ended up sending 90k.
7/8
Impressed how Attlee chaired Cabinet.
[No mention of first atomic bombs dropped.]
On 9 August he was given a Chillingham cow. [Chillingham Castle was for centuries owned by my wife’s family, my wife’s parents live there now, there are famous white cattle that for many centuries have been left wild to roam the hills. Very surprising one was sent off somewhere else but if anybody deserved such an honour it was AB! I strongly recommend a visit!]
On 10 August, seemed that Japan would surrender after the bombs of 6 and 9 August.
21/8
Refers to a new committee chaired by John Anderson to study the atomic bomb.
23/8
COS discussed their own successors. Monty very unpopular all over the place but the three Chiefs agreed on him as the next CIGS.
AB shocked at the cost of being put in the Lords, ‘I can’t get out of it under £200 which appals me’!!
28/8
Even after the entire war, COS struggling to discuss how to connect problems across land/sea/air viz Greece.
31/8
After our COS I had Paget to lunch, he was in excellent form and we had a most useful talk. In the evening I motored home.
FINISHED!
Hope you have enjoyed it and found it as fascinating as I have!
[To be continued… I’ll try to get to the end of 1945 in May! Let’s see how the planning fallacy develops… Planning fallacy defeated, barely, with an hour to spare… I know I have to deal with Sunak and a new party, I’ve been putting it off because it’s so depressing but… Much coming in the next week…]
I’ll now go back to the start and do from September 1939 to when he takes over as CIGS plus read a biography of AB. Then I’ll do a proper overview. The things that strike me most now without thinking more than 5 minutes…
Enormously impressive that WSC saw AB’s qualities and appointed him and kept him despite / because of the constant ‘I flatly disagree PM’. Enormously impressive that AB, with the integrity of an older age, stuck absolutely to his duty always to tell the unpleasant truth and not swerve it to make today easier. Enormously impressive that both managed to maintain their tempers and avoid saying anything that would have destroyed relations.
AB’s essential view of WSC seems reasonable: in all sorts of ways a nightmare but there was also something absolutely extraordinary about him that was totally and particularly suited to the appalling situation of spring 1940. In a parallel world without him, decisions in London could have enabled the Nazi regime to survive. God knows what world we’d now be in. He knew he was destined to save the world from Hitler and somehow at that fateful moment Westminster, which mostly hated him, intuited that nobody else would do.
PJ Grigg seems underrated by history?
The FO had some great people but was clearly broken as an institution even then, it is not a recent phenomenon. Reading AB’s diaries it’s no surprise that they totally screwed up dealing with Monnet 1945-55. The FO, like the Home Office, needs to be essentially closed and refounded. It’s rotten beyond any normal ‘reform’.
Crucial to absorb how much of AB’s time was spent on trying to get the best possible people into key jobs and how he personally had to spend a lot of time in unpleasant discussions relieving people of command. Improving teams is more gardening than engineering, constant weeding. ‘People, ideas, machines — in that order!’
It’s striking that there is no reference to papers/analysis of the possible effects of the atomic bomb in discussions of the COS. The impression given is that not only JIC but also COS generally (JIC then was part of COS, later moved to the Cabinet Office) was near-totally unaware of developments. I assume (and have a vague idea I’ve read about) secret wartime analysis done by someone in Whitehall. If anybody knows of a paper that AB would have read, or should have been made aware of, please link.
It’s striking how little detail on the Eastern Front he goes into. The massive battles such as Kursk are barely mentioned.
He was clearly right in his instincts that WSC, the FO and the Americans played Stalin dreadfully. We gave Stalin mountains of stuff through Lend Lease and asked for almost nothing. At the apex in London and Washington we were naive and foolish. (Hopkins was extraordinarily naive about Stalin and went to extraordinary lengths to get him what he wanted, free, while we were paying full whack.) And of course Stalin had agents in the US government actually writing policy on the Soviet Union. Disaster. And this encouraged Stalin to think he could keep bullying the weak West.
Overwhelmingly AB’s concern was the core strategy for the western Front: a) stopping political pressure for an early D-Day that would have failed, b) pushing for the strategy of: Africa then Mediterranean then Italy then get the shipping lined up then finally D-Day.
He spends 100X more time on the ins and outs of the internal debate on such key questions than he does on the motivations of the enemy. How much of this ratio is a product of not wanting to go too much into secret intelligence on Hitler’s inner circle? How much is this normal in every crisis? (I spent 100X more time worrying about my own side than the ‘enemy’ in 1999-2000, 2004, 2010-14, 2016 and 2019.)
How much was he aware of the attempts by Canaris to negotiate a) Canaris and a network would remove Hitler, b) an end to the war in the west in return for c) support to stop Soviet invasion?
It’s impossible for me to read of the meetings with ministers babbling ‘puerile’ nonsense and the PM unable to grasp ‘basic facts’ or stop talking, without thinking of 2020 and covid meetings with the PM and ministers. Some of my messages from the time are almost identical to AB’s comments. In 2015 most of SW1 thought Westminster worked fine, they believed all the nonsense about ‘a Rolls Royce civil service’, they thought Cameron a ‘serious’ character etc. Now there’s more recognition of the rotten truth. But there’s also a tendency to a) blame Brexit for the rot that there was there long before 2016 and b) overrate the calibre of people decades ago. It’s striking how AB refers to the catastrophe of World War I and how it destroyed so many of the country’s future leaders in politics and war.
I’ve discussed these diaries with many people since January when our little community started looking at them, from former Cabinet Ministers to special forces soldiers who’ve read the diaries while on a chopper to missions. One thing I’ve asked everyone: where in the British state now teaches how to think like AB, who uses case studies like the arguments over grand strategy viz the Mediterranean? The answer is: nowhere. This fits with something I found as I explored the deep state 2019-20. Where, I asked many senior officials, is the place that considers conflict across all areas — conventional, special forces, diplomatic, economic, space, electronic warfare, intelligence, hybrid operations, communications, all the way out to edgy special operations integrating a few of these things? ‘Nowhere Dominic, we don’t do that anywhere sadly.’ This is the undiscussed answer to many failures over many decades.
More to come… And a toast to Alanbrooke, we should try to spread knowledge of this hero to counterbalance some of those who focused more on PR…
I found this half hour program with the man himself.
31/5
AI updating
For subscribers since 2021, and for those who’ve read my blog since 2013, nothing in the AI story in recent months will be a surprise to you. But clearly mainstream world, and mainstream political world, is updating fast. This meme, about differing reactions to White House questions just 8 weeks apart, sums it up well! I noticed the tittering back in March. Back then, never mind a year ago, when Elon said the political world would have to take notice, it was seen in that world — the world of always-on professional Twitter sneerers — as another sign that Elon is ‘a moron’. Now the same sneerers are writing their own ludicrous ‘takes’ on the subject, or commissioning ‘guest pieces’ for their substacks, and acting like they’ve always been interested in the subject. Situation totally normal. Westminster is revolting.
Sunak, boats, ECHR
[8/3. As per my comment on 6/2, the Sunday Times story was a clue. No10 has decided to do the weak option plus a lot of spin to make it sound like the tough option. It won’t work. The theory in No10 that has persuaded Sunak is: if this doesn’t work then it sets up the election to be about boats, crime, and ECHR/HRA, and Starmer will have to defend it. This is a bad plan. It ignores the central fact about the 2024 election: it will come after 14 years of what’s seen as near total failure. As I said to Boris in January 2020, we either do big things in the next four years or 2024 is just more Tory promises, in which case the public will rightly boot us out. The chance was blown. Sunak should have chosen the option designed to actually solve the problem. But as I’ve said many times, optimising for ‘solve the actual problem’ almost always loses out to ‘blah pundit logic blah strategy blah excuse for not annoying powerful forces blah delay hard decisions blah the Mail and Sun will love it and won’t understand the problems blah strategy blah punt down the road’. Here they seem to have done a particularly Tory thing: they’ve annoyed the powerful forces (human rights lawyers, powerful officials, most of the media etc) AND won’t ‘stop the boats’. No10 has even briefed ‘we’re really taking back control’ when the Strasbourg court is literally in control! So they’ve invited the public to judge the PM on whether they ‘stop the boats’ and they won’t stop the boats. Nor will they stop the wider problems of violent/sex criminals, terrorists et al roaming the streets because of the ECHR/HRA. And the public will rightly conclude this PM doesn’t control the government any more than the last few so…]
[Startup Party blog coming… Nietzsche coming… AI horrors coming… Ukraine: western political leaders seem more detached from reality than at any point in the last 20 years. Those hopeful about governments dealing with AI should reflect that current attitudes to Ukraine and nuclear weapons show there is effectively zero chance of these people dealing well with AI — they haven’t figured out TV yet and their grasp of nuclear issues has deteriorated sharply… Meanwhile Brussels is consulting on how to ban the use of Bayes Theorem…]
[6/2. The Sunday Times yesterday had a story on the small boats and HRA/ECHR. The spin is intended to convey ‘the PM going really tough, very radical’ etc. But as often spin is intended to hide reality. If you read it carefully and understand HRA/ECHR, you will see that what’s actually happening is those who have argued for actually optimising for ‘stop the boats’ are losing and those who want yet another bit of legislation spun as getting tough which will not actually solve the problem are winning. The Tories have done this for 13 years. It’s therefore also a general sign that the Sunak operation is sinking. I will write in detail on this profoundly depressing subject in a few weeks and start the series on how to replace them with a new startup party.]
[1/2. Notice how so many official sources and ‘experts’ have told us every week since last summer that ‘Russia is about to collapse’ and ‘Russia is about to run out of artillery/missiles’. Maybe but so far their predictions have been duff. But the media-academia-politician axis has pushed so many chips in that most will scream for further escalation to avoid having to question their assumptions. And if Russia nevertheless makes progress they will write that the ‘real error’ was not escalating more/earlier. Fundamentally, those arguing for escalation do not want to face the unpleasant fact that nuclear powers can and do blackmail others — that’s the point of having them. There is no trace of an answer from any western government to the hard question: what risks are reasonable given the worst case scenario is 1000X worse than the whole of UKR being destroyed, and history shows that leaders constantly start wars in ways that are considered ‘crazy’ by their opponents? The pundit class is full of people who argue simultaneously a) Putin made a crazy blunder, unjustified by any rational calculations, to invade and b) we don’t have to worry about nuclear escalation because ‘Putin isn’t crazy’. The state of the political media means that western leaders are never asked to explain what they think about this.]
[News reports that Xi has put Wang Huning in charge of Taiwan reunification. I wrote about him last year here.]
Too many forgotten heroes!! The United Kingdom will always produce heroes; whether they are recognised today or tomorrow!! Exceptional homage DC; we feel your hope and pain!
You ask about a film called "the younger pitt". It is actually called "The Young Mr Pitt" and is available in two different cuts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_tgpBea2wc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM5ZdUDepZY (Best one)