University of Groningen Commander in chief Hamilton, Charles Nigel IMPORTANT NOTE: You are advised to consult the publisher's version (publisher's PDF) if you wish to cite from it. Please check the document version below. Document Version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Publication date: 2016 Link to publication in University of Groningen/UMCG research database Citation for published version (APA): Hamilton, C. N. (2016). Commander in chief: FDR's battle with Churchill, 1943. University of Groningen. Copyright Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Take-down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Downloaded from the University of Groningen/UMCG research database (Pure): http://www.rug.nl/research/portal. For technical reasons the number of authors shown on this cover page is limited to 10 maximum. Download date: 23-09-2021 Commander in Chief For Lady Ray Copyright © 2016 by Nigel Hamilton Commander in Chief FDR’s Battle With Churchill, 1943 PhD thesis to obtain the degree of PhD at the University of Groningen on the authority of the Rector Magnificus Prof. E. Sterken and in accordance with the decision by the College of Deans. This thesis will be defended in public on Thursday 28 April 2016 at 14.30 hours By Charles Nigel Hamilton born on 16 February 1944 in Alnmouth, United Kingdom Supervisors Prof. J.W. Renders Prof. D.F.J. Bosscher Assessment Committee Prof. K. van Berkel Prof. M.S. Foley Prof. C.A. van Minnen Contents Biography as Corrective 1 Prologue 25 Part One: A Secret Journey 1. A Crazy Idea 33 2. Aboard the Magic Carpet 41 Part Two: Total War 3. The United Nations 51 4. What Next? 71 5. Stalin’s Nyet 79 6. Addressing Congress 83 7. A Fool’s Paradise 87 8. Facing the Joint Chiefs of Staff 97 Part Three: Casablanca 9. The House of Happiness 109 10. Hot Water 123 11. A Wonderful Picture 129 12. In the President’s Boudoir 135 Part Four: Unconditional Surrender 13. Stimson Is Aghast 153 14. De Gaulle 165 15. An Acerbic Interview 175 16. The Unconditional Surrender Meeting 191 Part Five: Kasserine 17. Kasserine 209 18. Arch-Admirals and Arch-Generals 215 19. Between Two Forces of Evil 223 20. Health Issues 243 Part Six: Get Yamamoto! 21. Inspection Tour Two 253 22. Get Yamamoto! 259 23. “He’s Dead?” 271 Part Seven: Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts 24. Saga of the Nibelungs 281 25. A Battle Royal 285 26. No Major Operations Until 1945 or 1946 295 27. Churchill is Back with the Same Old Story 305 Part Eight: The Riot Act 28. The Davies Mission 315 29. A Dozen Dieppes in a Day 325 30. The Future of the World at Stake 335 31. The President Loses Patience 344 Part Nine: The First Crack in the Axis 32. Sicily—and Kursk 355 33. The Führer Flies to Italy 359 34. Countercrisis 367 35. A Fishing Expedition in Ontario 375 36. The President’s Judgment 381 Part Ten: Conundrum 37. Stalin Lies 389 38. War on Two Western Fronts 393 39. The Führer Is Very Optimistic 403 40. A Cardinal Moment 413 41. Churchill Is Stunned 419 Part Eleven: Quebec 1943 42. The German Will to Fight 425 43. Near-Homicidal Negotiations 435 44. A Longing in the Air 439 45. The President Is Upset—with the Russians 449 Part Twelve: The Endgame 46. Close to Disaster 463 47. A Darwinian Struggle 467 48. A Talk with Archbishop Spellman 470 49. The Empires of the Future 483 50. A Tragicomedy of Errors 491 51. Meeting Reality 499 52. A Message to Congress 515 53. Achieving Wonders 521 Maps 529 Acknowledgments 531 Commander in Chief: Genesis, Process, Outcome 533 Summary 569 Samenvatting 573 Index of Persons 577 Curriculum Vitae 589 Biography as Corrective Twenty-seven years ago the distinguished English biographer Robert Skidelsky (author of Keynes , in three volumes)1 rued the continuing lack of theorizing in the study of biography and, as a consequence, its poor status in the academy.2 As Skidelsky put it in a sort of status report on biography in 1988, The Troubled Face of Biography (a book of essays resulting from an international conference on the subject): “Scholars are far from convinced that biography has any important light to throw on art or,” he added, “his- tory.”3 “Biography,” he summarized, “is still not taken entirely seriously as literature, as history, or as a cogent intellectual exercise.”4 This sorry situation, in the view of the novelist and professor of American literature Malcolm Bradbury in the same work, had not changed very much since Wellek and Warren had published, in 1949, their “famous and influential” book, Theory of Literature.5 In that seminal account, biog- 1 Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Savior (New York: Viking, 1983); Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed (New York: Viking, 1992), and Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain (London: Macmillan, 2000). 2 Robert Skidelsky, “Only Connect: Biography and Truth,” in Eric Homberger and John Charmley, eds., The Troubled Face of Biography (St. Martin’s: 1998), 14. Paula Backscheider later lamented the same in Reflections on Biography (Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1999), xiv. 3 “Only Connect: Biography and Truth,” in Homberger and Charmley, The Troubled Face of Biography (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 1. 4 Skidelsky, “Only Connect: Biography and Truth”, p. 1-2. 5 René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, 1946). BIOGRAPHY AS CORRECTIVE raphy had been dismissed as of no “real critical importance. No biographical evidence can change or influence critical evaluation,” Wellek and Warren had asserted.6 Bradbury’s scorn for the ravages wreaked not only by post-war critical minds but then by deconstruction was even more pronounced – the 1980s having become “the age of the author denied and eliminated, airbrushed from the world of writing with a theoretical efficiency that would be the envy of any totalitarian regime trying to remove its discredited past lead- ers from the record of history.”7 Skidelsky thought biographers, to some degree, had brought this up- on themselves - not only by the lack of theorists, but by biographers’ hel- ter-skelter retreat from their earlier, Victorian responsibility to produce exemplary lives, and their growing surrender to public voyeurism. In his view, exemplary lives were coming back again, following Lytton Strachey’s great “debunking” bonanza after World War I -– which had at least given biography a serious and central justification -- but with the exemplariness transferred to the subject’s private life – life that was not necessarily ex- emplary, at least in the Victorian sense, but certainly so in the Roman Coli- seum sense. By the late 1980s, he lamented, biography had sunk in intellec- tual esteem, for “the example is the life itself, not what the life enabled a person to achieve. Or, more precisely, the life is the achievement.” As he added, in what is now a famous epigram, “what used to be called achieve- ment is now only one accompaniment, possibly a minor one, of a style of living” – from lesbianism to sexual arrangements.8 It would be no exaggeration to say that biography’s role and standing in society and in the academy has radically changed since The Troubled Face of Biography was published. The book’s editors, Eric Homberger and John 6 Malcolm Bradbury, “The Telling Life,” in Homberger and Charmley, The Troubled Face, pp. 134-5. 6 Ibid., 136. 7 Ibid., 134-5. 8 Skidelsky, “Only Connect: Biography and Truth”, 13. 2 COMMANDER IN CHIEF Charmley – one a professor of literature, the other a professor of history – had claimed that “everywhere in academic life the subtle, the not-so-subtle denigration of biography grows apace,” and reported with profound con- cern that “the procedures of biography” were “under direct attack in the humanities.”9 Twenty-seven years later the reverse could probably be averred: tra- ditional history, rather than biography, having come under academic and public fire, while biography’s status both in academia and outside may be said to have skyrocketed. The snobbery, superficiality, and lack of credibil- ity of historians, where their work touches on real individuals, caused his- tory in that period to become suspect not only in the academy but outside, as the work of biographers served increasingly to place in question their accounts and interpretations of important historical events, personalities and developments. This is a change or turn that in time will repay deeper study, I be- lieve. However, since it has gone more or less unobserved in current stud- ies of biography,10 let me briefly explore what might be termed “the bio- graphical corrective,” as I have observed and experienced it, both as an author and as a teacher of the craft since the 1970s. Robert Skidelsky, in his 1988 essay, did acknowledge the rise of more pro- fessional (i.e. well-researched) approaches to modern biography, fueled by 9 Eric Homberger and John Charmley, “Introduction”, in: Homberger and Charmley, The Troubled Face, ix, xii. 10 In Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff’s edited work The Seductions of Biography (London: Routledge, 1996), based on a one-year program of “discussion and research on biog- raphy,” there was an excellent first attempt to move beyond The Troubled Face of Biog- raphy from both literary and historical-cultural perspectives.