Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The Americans, especially General Marshall, were convinced that Germany could be defeated only by a cross-Channel attack, and advocated one on the largest possible scale at the earliest possible date.

These differences of strategic opinion reflected basic differences of outlook. The American outlook was largely military. They were eager to defeat Germany and end the war as soon as possible and had little time or energy for political problems or postwar planning. The British, on the other hand, were much concerned with political issues and the way in which the postwar situation would be influenced by strategic and military actions earlier. The Soviet leaders, to some extent, represented a combination of the two other points of view and could do so because there was no such divergence between their military and political or between their wartime and postwar aims. The more deeply the Anglo-Americans could be involved in the struggle with Germany, the sooner Germany could be defeated, and such a defeat, especially if it arose from a cross-Channel attack, would deliver all of eastern Europe into the power of the Red armies, which would find no rivals in that area.

Churchill and other British leaders could not forget the terrible casualties Britain had suffered in the trench warfare of 1916. They felt that these casualties had injured Britain permanently by wiping out a whole generation of Britain’s young people, especially among the better-educated class, and they were determined not to repeat this error in 1944. These leaders wanted a Balkan or Aegean offensive which, they believed, would, with fewer casualties, leave the English-speaking Powers dominant in the Mediterranean and in the Near East, would make it possible to balance Soviet power in eastern Europe, and would cut the Soviet Union off from the Balkans and some of central Europe. The possibility of Britain obtaining American consent to such an Aegean offensive was so remote that little effort was made to get it by direct persuasion. On the contrary, efforts to move toward it, step by step, were persistent. These efforts sought to postpone, or to reduce the emphasis on, the cross-Channel invasion, since this would, inevitably, have compelled the end of Britain’s Mediterranean projects. But here, again, American insistence on the cross-Channel invasion was so emphatic that the British could not challenge this directly, just as they could not advocate an Aegean invasion directly. Instead, while accepting the cross-Channel invasion explicitly, the British offered, one after another, alternative projects which would postpone or distract from the cross-Channel invasion.

The North African invasion was the first of these distractions, followed by the Sicilian campaign, and then by the Italian invasion. These were accepted by the Americans, since they felt it was urgent to do something to meet the Soviet demands for Anglo-American action against Hitler. Some kind of Balkan intervention was the next British proposal, but there was no hope of obtaining American consent to such a project. It was formally rejected by the Combined Chiefs of Staff on September 9, 1943. Churchill did not give up, but continued to push these peripheral schemes as best he could. He ordered General Wilson, British commander in the Near East, “to be bold, even rash” in attacking the Germans in the Aegean and he also tried to persuade Eisenhower to shift forces from Italy to the Aegean or to persuade Turkey to declare war on Germany. The only success Churchill had in these efforts was to persuade the Americans to engage in an amphibious attack on Italy at Anzio after the Americans had canceled plans for such an attack and had decided to choke off the Italian offensive in order to concentrate on the cross-Channel attack.

In the long run Churchill had to accept the American strategic plans because America would provide most of the supplies and even a majority of the men for any direct attack on Europe. The American ability to compel British acquiescence in strategic decisions was a very real element in the conduct of the war. It arose from the great British need for American manpower and supplies, and it functioned through the mechanism of the Combined Chiefs of Staff.

When Churchill came to the Arcadia Conference in Washington at the end of 1941, his chief aim was to retain the established priority of “Germany first.” He obtained this very easily on its own intrinsic merits, but at the same time he had to accept something he did not want—a Combined Chiefs of Staff rganization to control strategy on a worldwide basis. This new committee developed more power than Churchill, or anyone else, expected, because it had control of the supply of weapons. This power was decisive. Since no military operation could be conducted without weapons or supplies, control over these gave the Combined Chiefs of Staff control over all operations and, thus, over the strategic conduct of the war and over all local commanders. The Combined Chiefs of Staff operated through weekly meetings within the framework of the general policy decisions made by Roosevelt and Churchill at their periodic conferences. In this way Britain’s dependence on the United States for its implements of war gave the United States control of British strategic decisions and military operations, even in those areas (such as southeast Asia or the Near East) where a British commander was nominally in charge. In the same way, the United States had indirect control over much of Britain’s postwar planning.

In spite of the fact that the Anglo-Americans had agreed in ambiguous terms with Molotov’s insistence on the need for a direct attack on Hitler in Europe in 1942, it was perfectly clear that no such assault could be made that early in the war, so the attack on North Africa was offered as a substitute. In the course of the North African fighting it became clear that the cross-Channel attack could not be mounted before the spring of 1944. Accordingly, when the Germans in North Africa surrendered in May 1943, it was necessary to open a new front against Hitler quickly, since it would have been very dangerous to leave Hitler free to throw most of his forces against Russia for a full year. Plans for attacks on Sardinia or Sicily had been prepared, and on January 23, 1943, orders were issued to invade the latter island during the “favorable July moon.” This was not regarded by the Russians as a major effort, and their resentment rose to the boiling point. As Secretary of State Hull put it in his memoirs, the atmosphere in Anglo-Russian relations became reminiscent of what it had been exactly four years earlier, just before the Nazi-Soviet Treaty of August 1939. It was at this time, apparently, that two fateful, and mutually incompatible, decisions were made on the highest levels of authority in Washington and Moscow.

The decision made in Washington is one we have already mentioned— the decision to try to win Soviet cooperation in the postwar world by doing everything possible to win her trust and cooperation in the wartime period. This decision was probably based on the belief that it was not possible to control Russia’s postwar behavior by any policy of force against her during the war itself, since such an effort would benefit Hitler without winning any enforceable agreements from Stalin.

At this time, it would appear, Stalin made his decision to seek Russian security in the postwar world, not through any scheme for friendly cooperation in some idealistic international organization, as Roosevelt hoped, but by setting up, on the Soviet Union’s western frontiers, a buffer area of satellite states under governments friendly to Moscow. Such governments, probably in Communist control, would replace the Cordon sanitaire which the Western Powers had created to isolate Russia following the First World War, with what might be called a Cordon “insanitaire” which could serve to isolate the Soviet Union from the outside world following World War II. Washington was informed of this possibility by the American ambassador in Moscow on April 28, 1943, but paid little attention to the warning, probably because of the near-impossibility of finding any alternative policy toward the Soviet Union.