Grand Alliance

Grand Alliance, term coined by Churchill to describe the association of nations, in particular the UK, USA, and USSR, which came together to fight the Axis powers in the Second World War. The title was a conscious reference to the alliance which had defeated Louis XIV of France in the War of the Spanish Succession, 1701–13, under the leadership of Churchill's ancestor the first Duke of Marlborough.

The Alliance did not assume its final form until two and a half years after the war in Europe had begun, when the German attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 (see BARBAROSSA) and the Japanese attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor on 7 December precipitated those two non-belligerents reluctantly into the conflict. The relationship between London and Washington had however been progressively closer ever since the summer of 1940, when Roosevelt had realized that a Nazi Germany dominating Europe would ultimately threaten the USA. The passing of Lend-Lease legislation in March 1941 had already made the USA ‘the arsenal of democracy’; providing the UK not only with war supplies but also with naval escorts for the convoys which transported them across the Atlantic. The USSR, however, before it was attacked, had been even more hostile to the western ‘imperialist’ powers than to Nazi Germany, with whom it believed itself to be on good terms. The two totalitarian powers had divided Eastern Europe between them in the Nazi–Soviet Pact, signed by Molotov and Ribbentrop in August 1939, and Stalin had provided Hitler with economic assistance up to the moment of the invasion.

Once the USSR was in the war, however, the need to sustain its military effort was always a major consideration in British and American strategy; if only because victory in the east would release the full strength of the German Army and make invasion of the European continent from the west virtually impossible. It was for this reason that Churchill and Roosevelt, while they were together at the Placentia Bay conference, cabled Stalin to suggest the Three-Power conference. Yet relations between the USSR and its western allies were dogged by ideological hostility and cultural differences which complicated still further the task, difficult enough in itself, of getting help to a country isolated by its enemies from the west and by vast distances and poor communications in all other directions. The USSR therefore very largely fought its own war (seeGerman–Soviet war), giving to allies, whose intentions it never ceased to mistrust, the minimum information about its capabilities and plans.

When Germany attacked the USSR in June 1941 the UK had already been at war for almost two years—ever since, in implementation of the guarantee to Poland (see Poland, guarantee of) the British declaration of war on 3 September 1939. It had not been alone in doing so. In addition to the forces of the British Commonwealth and Empire, whose independent white dominions rapidly declared war on their own account, there was an apparently powerful continental ally in France, with whom the UK had already co-ordinated its strategic plans.

These plans were based on two highly optimistic assumptions. The first was that economic warfare would be successful because the German economy was already overstretched by military preparations, and so would be vulnerable to the economic pressure of naval blockade and direct, if discriminate, attack on her industries by the heavy bombers of the RAF. The second was that France would, with British help, be able to sustain a successful defence along its frontiers for however long was needed to build up sufficient military strength to invade a Germany already fatally weakened by blockade, bombardment, and, it was hoped, political dissension.

All these assumptions proved wrong. The German economy was not overstretched. The Germans indeed did not begin total mobilization on the scale introduced by the British in 1939 until early in 1942. They were able, by dominating or conquering their neighbours in Eastern Europe, to evade the effects of blockade. It took the RAF three years to develop the techniques and capacity to inflict serious damage on German industry (see strategic air offensives, 1). Above all, the German army with its blitzkrieg technique, had developed operational skills that enabled it to slice through the defences of the Western allies in May 1940, resulting in the fall of France, as rapidly as they had those of Poland during the Polish campaign in September 1939, and impose a total hegemony over the European continent, threatening the UK with its own weapons of air bombardment and blockade.

Nevertheless the general principles for Anglo-French strategy in the summer of 1939 continued to guide British strategic planning throughout the war. Germany was to be isolated and worn down to the point when a military offensive would stand a good chance of success. In 1940–1 such a prospect seemed remote: British strategy had to be almost entirely defensive; the only offensive weapon available was RAF Bomber Command, on whose capabilities and performance exaggerated expectations were placed. Having warded off the German invasion threat of summer 1940 (see SEALION) and survived the bombing of its cities in the winter of 1940–1 (see Blitz), the UK could do little more than defend the sea lanes across which came the supplies from North America that enabled it to survive. In the Middle East, early successes against the Italians had held out further false hopes of clearing the shores of North Africa and building up an alliance of Greece, Yugoslavia, and Turkey to contain German expansion in south-east Europe. But here again the speed and decisiveness of German operations in the Balkan and Western Desert campaigns in the spring of 1941 threw British forces back on the defensive.

Desperate as the position appeared, neither the Soviet nor even the US entry into the war appeared unmixed blessings for the UK. No one in the west, in the summer of 1941, expected the USSR to survive the Nazi onslaught which might then, the British feared, continue through Persia to the Middle East and even India. Nevertheless help had to be found for the USSR, and supplies badly needed by the UK itself had to be sent round the dangerous route of the North Cape in Arctic convoys decimated by German naval and air forces based in Norway. As for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, although it brought the USA into the war as an open ally, it also brought in Japan as an open enemy; and Japan was in a position to do more immediate damage to British interests in the Far East than was a still largely unmobilized USA to provide countervailing help.

Japan's entry into the war and invasion of South-East Asia brought about the nightmare situation with which the British Chiefs of Staff had warned throughout the 1930s that the UK would be unable to cope: war with major adversaries in western Europe, East Asia, and the Mediterranean. The British had constructed a major naval base at Singapore, and it was hoped that, in the event of war with Japan, a fleet would be available to sail there to command the surrounding seas. As it was, only two capital ships could be spared from the European theatre, the Prince of Wales and Repulse, and they were promptly sunk by Japanese aircraft. With the US Pacific fleet also eliminated by the Pearl Harbor attack, there was nothing to stop the Japanese from landing forces in the Philippines, the Malay pensinsula (see Malayan campaign), and the Netherlands East Indies and overrunning them within a matter of weeks.

Hitler, by fulfilling his alliance obligations to Japan and declaring war on the USA, removed all ambiguity about the situation (see also Axis strategy and co-operation). The Americans found themselves full belligerent allies of both the UK and the USSR. This situation had been to some extent anticipated by the US Joint Board, the predecessors of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff formed in February 1942. As early as November 1940 they had agreed that if the USA found itself at war with both Germany and Japan, they should stand on the defensive in the Pacific and give priority to the European theatre, where the major threat lay (see Rainbow Plans).

When in December 1941 Churchill and his military advisers attended the first Washington conference, (ARCADIA) to co-ordinate the strategy of the Alliance, a bare two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, there was still little inclination to depart from this decision. Nor were the members of the US Joint Board as yet in a position to dissent very strongly from the proposals presented to them by their British colleagues. These involved for 1942 the continued containment of Germany by closing and tightening a ring around it through maximum aid to the USSR and the conquest of the entire North African coast; together with bombing, blockade, and subversion. This, they hoped would clear the way for a return to the Continent in 1943 either across the Mediterranean or from Turkey into the Balkans, or by landings in western Europe. In the Far East, only such positions would be maintained as would safeguard vital interests and deny to Japan access to raw materials vital to its continuous war effort. The latter task was entrusted to ABDA Command under General Wavell, which was, however, to disintegrate two months later when the Japanese completed their conquest of South-East Asia.

The conference also established the mechanism through which the Alliance would operate. The Combined Chiefs of Staff committee was set up in Washington consisting of the American and British chiefs of staff sitting together, serviced by a Combined Secretariat and Combined Staff Planners. The British Chiefs of Staff were to be represented in their absence by the heads of the Joint Staff Mission which the British had already established in Washington; in particular by Field Marshal Dill, who had recently been replaced as Chief of the Imperial General Staff by General Brooke. In addition Combined Boards were set up to co-ordinate shipping, raw materials, and war production. All these were located in Washington, which became effectively the capital of the Alliance.

Within a few weeks the US Joint Chiefs of Staff were becoming increasingly unhappy with the strategy they had accepted in December 1941. For one thing the speed and success of the Japanese advance was making even minimal resistance in the Pacific war far more costly than had been anticipated; a cost which was to rise sharply during the summer when US forces tried to stem the tide in the Solomon Islands at Guadalcanal. Secondly the Soviet Union, in spite of a brilliant recovery in December 1941, was again coming under severe pressure. The British strategy seemed to the Americans altogether too vague and leisurely. In February Major-General Eisenhower, then chief of the war plans division in the war department, presented General Marshall, chief of the army staff, with radical proposals for a landing in France in 1942, and for a sufficient build-up of US forces in the UK to make possible a large-scale invasion in 1943.

There now appeared that fundamental difference in national strategic concepts that was to underlie Anglo-American differences for the next two years. The American concept was simple. Commanding as they did overwhelming resources, the only problem they foresaw was how to get them to the Continent in order to engage the bulk of available German forces, defeat them decisively in battle, and pursue them in Napoleonic style to Berlin. For the Americans there seemed no strategic problem that numbers and technology could not cure.

The British, always short of resources, could not afford to think so boldly. Further, they had had bitter first-hand experience of the quality of the German armed forces. They therefore emphasized the need, first, to wear down German military strength by all possible means before engaging in confrontation, and secondly, to force maximum dispersion on the German armies so that the Allies would be able to get ashore and then engage with a favourable ratio of forces. To the British the Americans appeared naïve, to the Americans the British seemed timid; neither judgement was entirely unfair. The Americans were reluctant to learn from the experience of an ally for whose military performance to date they had little respect, while the British generals were not going to risk the lives of their men on the scale they had themselves experienced in the First World War. British tactics as well as strategy tended to err on the side of caution, American on the side of rashness. It was a difference that not only bedevilled strategic planning but led to friction in every theatre, and at every level of command.

The British refused to undertake a premature landing on the coast of France in 1942, but in April 1942 they accepted in principle the American long-range strategy: the build-up of forces in the UK in 1942 (BOLERO) in preparation for a major landing in France in 1943 (ROUNDUP). It was a strategy, however, that failed to satisfy Roosevelt. Conscious of the growing public pressure for action in the Pacific, concerned at the plight of the USSR, and aware also that Congressional elections were due in November, he insisted that US forces should be engaged in action somewhere in the European theatre before the end of the year. With a landing on the French mainland ruled out, the only remaining option was one that Churchill had proposed the previous December; a landing in French North Africa (GYMNAST; later TORCH), to join hands with British forces advancing west from Egypt, thus clearing the Mediterranean and ‘closing the ring’. Marshall and Eisenhower accepted this plan only with the greatest reluctance. Not only would it make ROUNDUP logistically impossible in 1943, but it would create an open commitment in the Mediterranean and make it more difficult to resist the pressure for a transfer of resources to the Pacific. Further, it would delay help to the hard-pressed USSR, as Churchill had to explain to Stalin on an awkward visit to Moscow in August 1942.

Nevertheless Eisenhower accepted command of the Allied forces and the TORCH landings which began the North African campaign took place on the coast of North-West Africa on 8 November 1942. Simultaneously at the other end of the Mediterranean the British and Commonwealth Eighth Army under General Montgomery finally defeated the German–Italian forces opposing them at the second battle of El Alamein. Thanks to stubborn German resistance in the Tunisian mountains the Allies did not finally clear the shore of North Africa until May 1943. Even then, six months after the TORCH landings, the future course of Allied strategy was still undecided.

The Combined Chiefs of Staff met for the second time, together with Churchill and Roosevelt, at Casablanca, in January 1943 (see SYMBOL). The Americans once again pressed for a landing in France in 1943, failing which, they indicated, they would have to transfer substantial forces to the Pacific. The British on the other hand urged what became known as ‘the Mediterranean strategy’. By continuing operations in the battle for the Mediterranean, argued Churchill and General Brooke, they would bring pressure to bear on the weakest element in the enemy alliance, Italy, thus forcing the Germans to detach forces both from the Eastern Front and from the defences of north-west France. The Soviets would then be helped in the most direct way possible, while the German defences in France would be weakened in preparation for a full-scale attack, if not in 1943 then certainly in 1944. General Marshall, reluctantly accepting that a 1943 invasion was now out of the question, acquiesced to the extent of agreeing to an attack on Sicily once the African coast was cleared. Beyond that he was not prepared to go.

A further meeting therefore had to be held in Washington in May 1943 (see TRIDENT), during the closing stages of the fighting in North Africa. Opinions had now hardened on both sides. Churchill, elated with the successes of the British forces in North Africa, urged that the war should now be carried across the Mediterranean into Italy itself, whose collapse would transform the strategic situation. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the other hand, insisted that nothing should now be allowed to interfere with the invasion of north-west France planned for 1944. Eventually it was agreed that the invasion (now meaningfully renamed OVERLORD) should be firmly scheduled for 1 May 1944; that seven of Eisenhower's divisions should return from the Mediterranean to the UK to take part in it; but that with his remaining forces Eisenhower should mount such operations as he considered necessary to knock Italy out of the war. The invasion of Italy as such was not specified. But the landings in Sicily on 10 July (see Sicilian campaign) led to a collapse of Italian resistance so complete that even if it had not resulted as it did in the overthrow of Mussolini and secret overtures for surrender, the move into Italy itself would have been almost a fore gone conclusion. With General Marshall's blessing, therefore, Eisenhower landed one of his armies across the straits of Messina at Reggio di Calabria on 3 September (BAYTOWN) and landed the other at Salerno, south-east of Naples, six days later.

Meanwhile attention had to be given to the problems of the Far East. Although the priority given to the European theatre remained in principle unchanged, the Combined Chiefs of Staff had agreed at Casablanca that adequate forces should be allocated to the Pacific and Far Eastern theatres, with the object of maintaining pressure on Japan, retaining the initiative and attaining a position of readiness for a full-scale offensive against Japan as soon as Germany was defeated. Japanese expansion had already been checked, primarily by the decisive naval battle at Midway fought from 4 to 7 June 1942. At Casablanca it was possible to begin planning a counter-offensive.

In the Far East even more than in Europe Allied planning was complicated by different strategic concepts—indeed, different strategic objectives. Both the UK and the USA were of course concerned with the ultimate defeat of Japan, and the British accepted that in bringing about that defeat they could play only a very secondary role. But the ultimate objective of the British, especially of Churchill, was to recover the imperial possessions—Burma, Malaya, Hong Kong, Singapore—from which they had been so humiliatingly evicted. Churchill, an imperialist to his fingertips, declared that he had not become the king's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. But the USA had certainly not gone to war to preserve it. Even British rule in India, already threatened by the activities of the Congress Party (see India, 3), was openly disapproved of by Roosevelt.

Indeed Roosevelt did not see the British as his principal allies in the Far East at all. That role was played by China under General Chiang Kai-shek, with whom the USA had a close ‘special relationship’. It was, after all, in an attempt to deter Japan from conquering China (seeChina incident) that the USA had imposed on Japan the crippling trade restrictions which made the Japanese try to seize the resources of South-East Asia, thus precipitating the Pacific war. For Washington the initial objective was therefore to rescue China; partly as an obligation of honour —one of which the skilful and attractive Madam Chiang Kai-shek constantly reminded the American people—but also because at this stage of the war, it was generally accepted that air, naval, and military bases in China would be needed for mounting an invasion of Japan and so securing her defeat.

By 1942 Japan controlled the entire Chinese coastline. In American eyes therefore, the best contribution the British could make to the war in the Far East was to restore land communications between the outside world and the besieged Chinese government by reopening the Burma Road. Until this was done all help for Chiang Kai-shek had to be airlifted from north-east India over the Hump, some of the worst flying country in the world. The British on the other hand regarded the Chinese military potential as negligible and were unimpressed by Chiang either as a political or as a military leader, an opinion which he himself helped to reinforce when he attended the Cairo conference in November 1943 (see SEXTANT). Far from wishing to attack overland through villainous campaigning country, British preference was for amphibious operations south-east across the Indian Ocean to reconquer their old possessions; Burma, Malaya, Singapore. Unfortunately for the British not only were these operations of little interest to the USA, but they competed for the same resources for amphibious warfare that were needed in the Pacific and the European theatres.

At Casablanca the Americans agreed to provide resources for a seaborne attack on Rangoon (ANAKIM) as a step in opening the Burma Road, and sketched out their own plans for the Pacific. Their two-pronged strategy was already becoming apparent. In the central Pacific, Admiral Nimitz's amphibious forces would advance from Midway to seize Truk in the Caroline and Guam in the Mariana Islands; while in the south-west Pacific, General MacArthur was to squeeze the Japanese out of the fortress they had established at Rabaul in the Bismarck Archipelago, in preparation for a further offensive.

By the time of the TRIDENT conference in May 1943, it was clear that no resources would be available for ANAKIM. The Burma Road could be opened, if at all, only by an overland offensive. For this the British were far from ready: the most they were prepared to undertake was a limited offensive in Upper Burma to safeguard the air route, over which it was hoped that greatly increased aid could now be flown. In the Pacific the lines of the two-pronged attack became clearer, with MacArthur's line of operations being extended up the northern shores of New Guinea towards the Philippines. But the possibility was recognized, for the first time, that American control of the seas in the Western Pacific might force Japan to surrender before its territory was invaded.

It was further agreed at the first Quebec conference in August 1943 (see QUADRANT) that a new Allied command structure should be created, in succession to the ill-fated ABDA, to control operations in South-East Asia—South-East Asia Command. The commanders appointed to head it indicated the inchoate breadth of its responsibilities. The Supreme Allied Commander, Admiral Mountbatten, was an expert on amphibious warfare, and his appointment reflected British, especially Churchillian, aspirations to a seaborne reconquest of the Malay peninsula. His deputy, the American Lt-General Stilwell, also held the post of chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek, and indeed commanded American-trained Chinese forces in the field (see China–Burma–India theatre). The only place where their interests overlapped was Burma. Since adequate resources for any amphibious operations could not in any case be made available until the war had been won in Europe, attention for the next year was therefore focused on operations in this most inaccessible and unfriendly of regions. As operations there had to be supplied almost entirely from the air, and since the aircraft capable of doing so were also required to supply China over the Hump, strategic decisions usually boiled down to the allocation of these machines; decisions which, because of their political delicacy, could often only be taken in Washington. In any event the forces available in the theatre were insufficient to effect any change in the strategic situation for another year to come. When this did happen it was to be as a result not of an Allied but of a Japanese initiative.

Meanwhile in Europe the collapse of Italy in September 1943 at the start of the Italian campaign seemed to the British to open up a huge range of dazzling possibilities. Not only did they foresee a rapid German withdrawal at least to the Pisa–Rimini Line (see Gothic Line), but the Balkan peninsula and the Aegean Islands, which had been largely garrisoned by Italian troops, now seemed wide open to Allied penetration. But the opportunities quickly vanished. The speed with which the Germans disarmed and replaced their former allies, Hitler's determination to retain the economic resources of the Balkans, and the unimpressive performance of the Anglo-American forces in southern Italy convinced the German High Command that they could contain the Allied advance in the mountains south of Rome. The Allied forces thus rapidly found themselves faced with the prospect of a gruelling campaign up the length of a peninsula ideally suited to the needs of defence. Undeterred, Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff now pressed for a revision of the strategic concept agreed at TRIDENT so as to make possible the maintenance of continuing pressure in the Mediterranean; even if it meant that the invasion of France would have to be deferred.

The Americans, however, were adamant. Having fought hard for an agreed date for OVERLORD— 1 May 1944—they were not now going to abandon it. Nor would they reconsider their demand that seven divisions should be transferred from the Mediterranean theatre to the UK, to take part in the operation. They were unimpressed by the British arguments, that only by maintaining pressure in the Mediterranean could they bring continuing help to the USSR and prevent the Germans from strengthening their forces in France to an extent that would make landings impossible. They saw them rather as a specious excuse for a reluctance, on the part of a military and political leadership which remembered the First World War, to engage in any frontal attack against the Wehrmacht; that, and also cover for an ill-defined ‘Balkan strategy’.

A myth was propagated by some British and American journalists after the war (in particular Chester Wilmot and Hanson Baldwin) that the British had a long-term politico-military strategy derived from historical experience, which consisted in evading a direct frontal approach against the Germans' defences and using the flexibility of sea power to attack them at a point where they were ill-prepared and where the greatest political advantages might be reaped. Such advantages, so this thesis ran, were available in south-east Europe, where stalwart resistance movements were already alive in Greece and Yugoslavia, and where military operations might bring Anglo-American forces into central Europe before it fell into Stalin's hands. It has been argued that this was the real objective of Churchill's strategy. In the aftermath of the war, after the famous ‘Iron Curtain’ had descended from Stettin to Trieste, it was seen as a great opportunity missed, and the US Chiefs of Staff were sorely blamed for it.

In fact the British had no such long-term strategy. Before the summer of 1943, it is true, this Balkan option had not been excluded, and was in fact being urged by the British High Command in Cairo (see Middle East Command) where close links were maintained with resistance movements in the Balkans. But the decisions at TRIDENT finally ruled it out, and the opening of the Italian campaign drew in all available forces in the Mediterranean. At Churchill's urging the Dodecanese campaign was mounted in September 1943 in which an attempt was made to seize the Dodecanese, but the Americans refused to divert forces to help the operations, and speedy German reaction foiled the British attempt at a coup de main. Allied deception operations did indeed maintain a highly credible threat of an invasion of the Balkans by an imaginary Twelfth British Army, but in reality all that was intended was continuing help to the resistance movements on an ever-increasing scale. As for the Soviets, it was not until the summer of 1944 that their advance into eastern Europe was seen as a political or a military threat to the west. In 1943 the western Allies looked forward to it with eager anticipation.

By the autumn that advance was well under way. In November 1942– January 1943, simultaneously with Allied victories at both ends of the Mediterranean, the Soviet victory at Stalingrad had thrown the German armies on to the defensive. In July, simultaneously with the invasion of Sicily, the Red Army destroyed German armoured strength in the battle of Kursk (CITADEL). By the end of September they had reached the Dnieper, and at the beginning of November they broke across it at Kiev. With the ring now seriously tightening around Germany, the time had come for the western Allies to co-ordinate their strategy with that of the USSR. At the end of November, Roosevelt and Churchill for the first time met Stalin at the Teheran conference (see Eureka) in order to do so.

The British and the Americans arrived in Teheran with their differences unsettled, and Stalin had effectively to adjudicate between them. These differences had been exacerbated by an American proposal that, after the capture of Rome, the Italian campaign should be virtually closed down and Mediterranean forces concentrated on an invasion of the South of France to coincide with OVERLORD. The Americans had no problem in enlisting Stalin's support for their view that OVERLORD should be the main operation for 1944 to which all other operations, whether in the Mediterranean or elsewhere would be secondary; though whether Stalin accepted this on purely strategic grounds or in order to give himself a free hand in eastern Europe must remain uncertain.

So the French Riviera landings (ANVIL) were decreed. Church ill's continued pleas for operations in the Aegean were overruled, but it was agreed that the advances in Italy should be continued to the Pisa–Rimini Line. Most important of all, Stalin announced his intention of entering the war against Japan once the war in Europe was over. Since the US Chiefs of Staff still at this stage believed that the defeat of Japan could only be brought about by operations launched from the mainland of Asia, and since that mainland was still occupied by the bulk of the Japanese Army, this announcement came as a considerable relief to them.

Though they bowed to the views of their two major allies and confirmed their acceptance of OVERLORD for May 1944 (Generals Eisenhower and Montgomery and their staffs being transferred from the Mediterranean to take charge of the operation), the British continued to argue against ANVIL. The stubbornness of German resistance along the River Garigliano, and the failure of the Allied attempt to circumvent it by their landings at Anzio in January 1944 (SHINGLE) led to ANVIL being postponed from May to July, but Churchill remained deeply unhappy with the idea of withdrawing some eleven divisions from a theatre where their presence might make a decisive difference to one where they could not. His discontent boiled over when at last, in May, the Allies broke through the German defences with operation DIADEM and surged forward to capture Rome on 4 June.

Once again, as in the previous September, glittering possibilities opened up. The Pisa–Rimini Line now appeared to Churchill far too modest an objective, as it did to General Alexander, the Allied C-in-C in Italy. Alexander put forward far-reaching proposals, contingent on his retaining the ANVIL divisions, for an offensive that would break through the Gothic Line between Pisa and Rimini, overrun the plain of Lombardy, and thence strike north-east into Austria via the Ljubljana gap. The morale of his forces, reported Alexander, ‘was irresistibly high…Neither the Apennines nor even the Alps should prove a serious obstacle to their enthusiasm and skill.’

Needless to say, Churchill gave these proposals his strongest support, but the Americans would have nothing to do with them. OVERLORD had been successfully launched on 6 June without the simultaneous landings in the South of France originally demanded; but the Americans insisted that those landings (now renamed DRAGOON) should still be mounted so as to open up additional supply facilities for the advance on Germany. Churchill continued to plead for a change of plan, but in vain: the DRAGOON landings took place, against minimal German resistance, on 15 August.

Meanwhile at the end of June the Red Army had opened a massive offensive along the entire length of their front. By August they had crossed the Polish frontier. But the Warsaw rising, the apparently deliberate inactivity of the Soviet forces while the Germans crushed the insurrection, and Stalin's refusal to provide facilities for Allied air forces to drop supplies, opened the first serious rift in Allied unity and sharply diminished western enthusiasm at the prospect of the Red Army liberating eastern Europe.

For Churchill, and some later critics of Allied strategy, this seemed to provide tragically belated justification for his arguments against ANVIL. But the possibility that Alexander could have achieved all he promised, even if he had been left with ANVIL divisions, was remote. The terrain north-east of Venice is ideally adapted to defence, as the Italians had found to their cost in the First World War. Quite possibly, however, the Allied armies, had they not been weakened, might have broken through into the Po valley and liberated northern Italy before the winter. As it was, Alexander just failed to break through the German defences north of Pisa and Rimini, and the offensive bogged down until the following spring. Meanwhile Italian resistance forces in Lombardy, which had risen in September in response to overoptimistic Allied appeals, were crushed by the Germans as ruthlessly as had been the Poles, and felt no less bitter a sense of betrayal.

In September 1944 indeed, with the German forces broken in the Normandy campaign and streaming back to their own frontiers, the Allies were confident that the war would be over by the end of the year—an over-confidence which played a large part in the check their forces received at Arnhem (see MARKET-GARDEN). Despite Churchill's insistence at the second Quebec Conference (see OCTAGON), held just before MARKET-GARDEN was launched, that the UK take a larger role in helping to defeat Japan, it was a matter of considerable importance for the British that the war should not drag on for another year. They had reached the end of their resources, demographic as well as economic, and their dependence upon the USA was becoming absolute. For the Americans there was no such urgency. Having landed five armies in France, the Supreme Allied Commander, General Eisenhower, was prepared to use them all in a prolonged strategy of attrition on a broad front. His subordinate, Field Marshal Montgomery, however, urged a more decisive strategy in which British forces would spearhead a drive on Berlin. The dispute rumbled on through the winter, and though Mongomery's approach understandably found strong support in London, in Washington the Combined Chiefs of Staff, equally understandably, refused to interfere with Eisenhower's conduct of operations.

The toughness of German resistance throughout the winter provided some justification for Eisenhower's view, that the only way to overcome it was by a process of grinding attrition in which Allied matériel could make its superiority felt. By the end of March 1945 that attrition had done its work. The Allied armies surged across the Rhine, and found little resistance beyond it.

Meanwhile the Red Army had driven deep into eastern Germany, and by the end of February it stood along the line of the Oder and the Neisse rivers, 60 km. (37 mi.) from Berlin. Eisenhower now planned to drive deep into central Germany in the direction of Leipzig in order to cut off the ‘National Redoubt’ that he believed Hitler to be preparing in the Alps. Indeed he informed the Soviets that he intended to do so. Montgomery made a last appeal for a drive on Berlin, with the full support of Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff. In the political confrontation that was now developing between the USSR and the western Allies, Berlin seemed a prize of the highest importance. But Marshall again supported Eisenhower, and Roosevelt, now a dying man, did not overrule him. Roosevelt in fact died on 12 April, leaving a political vacuum in Washington in these final critical weeks. When two weeks later Churchill urged Eisenhower to speed his advance into Czechoslovakia in order to occupy Prague, Marshall vetoed the proposal. ‘Personally,’ he said, in a phrase that haunted him ever after, ‘I should be loath to hazard American lives for purely political purposes.’

Although he spoke as a soldier, Marshall in fact probably expressed the views of the bulk of the American, and perhaps of the British, people. The Soviets were still greatly admired allies—they had borne the brunt of the fighting and without their sacrifices victory would have been impossible. A military confrontation with them, in which Allied lives might have been placed at risk, in order to gain a few more miles of territory would have been very difficult to justify before a war-weary public opinion. In any case boundaries between the Allied zones of occupation (see Allied Control Commissions) had already been drawn up when Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt had held their second ‘Summit’ meeting at Yalta in February 1945 (see ARGONAUT)—boundaries which left Berlin deep within the Soviet zone.

Most of the business at Yalta was concerned with the settlement of Germany, Europe, and the United Nations, once the war was over, and so falls outside the ambit of this article. One event of strategic importance did, however, take place: Stalin reaffirmed his intention of entering the war with Japan three months after the conclusion of the war in Europe, and a secret agreement was reached on his price for agreeing to do so (see Kurile and Sakhalin islands).

By this time events in the Far East had moved swiftly. In the Central Pacific, Admiral Nimitz's forces had cleared the Marshall and Mariana Islands and in October 1944 had destroyed what was left of Japanese sea power in the battle of Leyte Gulf. General MacArthur's forces, leapfrogging up the northern coast of New Guinea, had at the end of January 1945 landed in the Philippines. In the Burma campaign, however, the Japanese themselves had taken the initiative in March 1944 with an attack on the British bases at Kohima and Imphal. They were held and thrown back in disorder the following June. In October Slim's Fourteenth Army followed on their heels with an offensive which was to capture Mandalay in March and Rangoon in May 1945: the Burma Road at last stood open.

Ironically it was no longer needed. In April 1945 US forces landed on Okinawa in the Ryūkyū Islands, bringing the whole of Japan within fighter as well as bomber range. Tight blockade from the sea and continual battering from the air now made the defeat of Japan without the need for invasion a serious possibility. Nevertheless planning for the invasion continued, and it was agreed that British naval, land, and air forces should take part. Though bases were no longer required on the Asian mainland, Soviet intervention was still needed, to mop up the large Japanese Army stationed there. Plans for these final operations were discussed at the last Allied summit meeting at Potsdam in July (see TERMINAL); a meeting which also issued a joint declaration calling upon Japan to surrender and at which President Truman informed Stalin that the USA ‘had a new weapon of unusual destructive force’. Stalin replied ‘that he was glad to hear it and hoped that they would make good use of it against the Japanese’. On 6 August the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Two days later the USSR declared war on Japan. On 14 August Japan accepted the Allied demand for unconditional surrender.

The Potsdam conference was terminal not only for the war but also for the Grand Alliance. Roosevelt was dead, Churchill was voted out of office while the conference was actually in progress, and Stalin had already begun the process of insulating the USSR and its conquests from Western influence that would lead directly to the Cold War. The USA terminated Lend-Lease to the UK, as to all its other allies, and the two governments quarrelled bitterly over the terms of the loan that was to take its place. Dis agreement over the treatment of Germany, over British access to the results of joint nuclear research, and over British policy in Palestine was rapidly to destroy the old wartime camaraderie. But the Grand Alliance had served its purpose. In spite of all differences and disagreements, it had held together as effectively and functioned as efficiently as any in the history of war.

Michael Howard

Bibliography

Butler, J. R. M. (ed.), History of the Second World War, Military Series: Grand Strategy, 6 vols. various authors (London, 1956–76).
Matloff, M. , and Snell, E. , United States Army in World War II: Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare 1942–44, 2 vols. (Washington, DC, 1953–9).
Feis, H. , Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin: the War they Waged and the Peace they sought (Princeton, 1957).