Masters and Commanders by Andrew Roberts

Author:Andrew Roberts
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780061874499
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-07-06T10:00:00+00:00

When the two sides resumed their meeting at 3 p.m., the Combined Chiefs of Staff had before them a draft note setting out tentative agreements. A deal had been brokered by Dill during the lunch adjournment, so that the topics under discussion could move on to the much less contentious issues of supply vessels, Polish forces, air raids on Berlin and the naval situation in the western Mediterranean. At one point Brooke revealed that a plan had been drawn up for seizing southern Spain with six divisions if it was deemed necessary to deny it to the Germans. Of the morning arguments with King, Kennedy recorded: ‘It is good to blow off steam and probably the process is necessary.’33 Brooke described the two-and-a-half-hour morning meeting as ‘very heated’ and thought King was ‘still evidently wrapped up in the war of the Pacific at the expense of everything else!’

Years later Brooke showed that much of the credit for the lunchtime breakthrough and subsequent draft note had been down to Dill. ‘I was in despair and in the depths of gloom’ on leaving the conference room, he recalled, and as he walked upstairs to his hotel room had told Dill: ‘It is no use, we shall never get agreement with them!’ His friend and mentor replied: ‘On the contrary, you have already got agreement to most of the points, and it only remains to settle the rest.’ They sat on Brooke’s bed after lunch and went through each individual point on the agenda, Brooke occasionally protesting that he ‘would not move an inch’ on some of them. ‘Oh yes, you will,’ replied the former CIGS. ‘You know that you must come to some agreement with the Americans and that you cannot bring the unsolved problem up to the Prime Minister and the President. You know as well as I do what a mess they would make of it!’34 This was unfair: the successful Torch had been Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s operation, carried out against the initial wishes of Brooke and Marshall, but it was undoubtedly this imperative that drove the generals towards compromise.

Brooke authorized Dill to talk to Marshall as a go-between. Portal also helped draw up the compromise formula into the draft note, which both Brooke and Marshall agreed to adopt when the meeting reconvened that afternoon. ‘I am certain that the final agreement being reached was due more to Dill than to anyone else,’ wrote Brooke after the war, ‘acting as the best possible intermediary between Marshall and myself.’35

(Not everyone saw Dill as an honest broker: Leonard Mosley claimed that the British Chiefs of Staff lacerated Marshall’s plans for a 1943 cross-Channel invasion because Dill had leaked the full US programme for Casablanca to them beforehand. ‘They now proceeded to tear it to pieces, not least Marshall’s pet plan for the invasion, which was ridiculed out of existence.’ Wedemeyer, who spoke into Mosley’s tape-recorder at length, told Mosley that Dill ‘got extremely close to Marshall, and provided the British Chiefs and

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