Churchill's Confidant: Jan Smuts, Enemy to Lifelong Friend by Richard Steyn

Author:Richard Steyn [Steyn, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781472140753
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2018-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

In the end, it was not necessary to go to ‘all lengths’: on 17 July a message from Marshall to Eisenhower proposed a direct amphibious assault on Naples. A delighted Churchill telegraphed Marshall: ‘Post Husky, I am with you heart and soul.’8 To Smuts, he cabled: ‘General Marshall’s view is a great relief to me … We all go the same way home.’9 Eisenhower, however, was not satisfied with the air cover mooted for the navy and called off plans to attack the key port of Naples in order to cut off the Axis forces in Sicily. Instead, he decided the Allied army should establish a firmer toehold on the mainland, before proceeding northwards.

The fall of Sicily prompted the dismissal, arrest and detention of Mussolini, and the appointment – by King Victor Emmanuel III – of himself and Marshal Pietro Badoglio to govern Italy. Within weeks, the new leaders opened secret negotiations with the Allies, at which point Churchill persuaded Washington that yet another summit was necessary to settle the future of Italy. On 5 August the prime minister left with an entourage of 200 aboard the Queen Mary for a meeting with Roosevelt and his American advisers in Quebec. There, at the conference, code-named Quadrant, more serious differences of opinion emerged between US and British military chiefs over Allied strategy. The Americans, under pressure from Stalin, were insistent on inflicting a direct body blow on Germany by carrying out Operation Overlord in May 1944, as planned, whereas Churchill and his generals argued that, if the Germans were capable of mustering fifteen mobile divisions in France in the two months following an invasion, the landings should be postponed.10 To the chagrin of the Americans, it appeared as if the British were reneging on a prior commitment.

This was not the case, however. Unlike Churchill (and Smuts), as well as Stalin, America’s military establishment had given no consideration to any post-war settlement in Europe, and were not intending to remain on the continent for any longer than was necessary.11 Whereas Churchill had already foreseen the likelihood of Stalin pushing as far as he could into western Europe after the war, the Americans had not thought that far ahead. They looked with suspicion upon Churchill’s eagerness to take the offensive in the Mediterranean, as well as in the Balkans, Greece and the Middle East, in preference to mounting the risky Channel crossing, regarding it as a reversion to Britain’s ‘traditional imperialism’, to which they remained resolutely opposed.12 Harry Hopkins told Anthony Eden that Roosevelt loved Churchill ‘for the war, but [was] horrified at his reactionary attitude … after the war’.13 The president’s anti-colonial stance seemed not to extend, however, to America’s own overseas colonies and dependencies – in the Philippines, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.

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