World War Two: 1942 and Hitler's Soft Underbelly

'In 1940 the British Army was kicked off the beaches of northern France.

'Instead of trying to get back there,

'it spent the next four years fighting around the Mediterranean.

'The British only returned to France,

'with their American allies in 1944, while the Soviet Union

'bore the brunt of a life or death struggle with Hitler's Third Reich.'

Why did the British and Americans spend

so much of the war paddling around the Mediterranean,

around North Africa and Italy,

thousands of miles from the enemy's heartland?

Why was Britain's most celebrated victory

of the Second World War named after a nondescript little railway station

on the coast of Egypt?

The American Army was sure from the start that the quickest way

to beat Hitler was straight back across the English Channel,

21 miles wide, into German-occupied France and on to Berlin.

But in 1942, President Roosevelt and the Americans

were still newcomers to the war.

Churchill would persuade them to target not France,

but supposedly easier territory in North Africa and later Italy,

what he called "the soft underbelly" of Hitler's Europe.

In reality, the soft underbelly would see some of the worst carnage

in Western Europe.

Fighting akin to the Great War of 1914-18.

Britain and America became bogged down,

while the Soviet war machine ground on remorselessly

towards the real target, Berlin.

The fascinating question, I think, is why did Churchill

and the British persist in their Mediterranean strategy?

The story takes us into some of the less familiar aspects

of Britain's Second World War.

A story of a faltering empire and a demoralised people.

An army fearful of going head-to-head against the Germans

on the battlefields of France.

A government increasingly dependent on the Americans.

A military machine whose secret weapon,

the code-breakers of Bletchley Park, had dangerous flaws.

The campaigns in North Africa and Italy also show us

an unfamiliar side of Churchill.

Very different from the jaw-jutting bulldog

of Britain's "finest hour" in 1940.

A war leader who was acutely vulnerable.

Losing faith in his army, politically threatened at home.

Even ready, at times, to deceive his cherished American allies.

The war in the Mediterranean

would expose Winston's own soft underbelly.

'In June 1942, Winston Churchill was conferring with

'Franklin Roosevelt in the White House.'

'During their meeting, a telegram was brought in.'

'The President handed it without comment to the Prime Minister.'

"Tobruk has surrendered, with 25,000 men taken prisoners."

Churchill never forgot that moment.

One of the heaviest blows, he recalled, of the whole war.

Tobruk was a major port on the Libyan coast,

close to the border with Egypt and considered vital

to Britain's position in North Africa.

But the Germans had launched a daring surprise attack,

and cut the British fortress off from reinforcement.

Tobruk's defences had been neglected and British morale collapsed.

The commander sent a pitiful last message.

"Situation - shambles. Am doing the worst."

His garrison, actually 33,000 men,

surrendered to an enemy force that turned out to be half its size.

Churchill did not conceal from the President his bitter anguish.

As he said, "Defeat is one thing. Disgrace is another."

The capitulation at Tobruk opened up the prospect of Germany

rampaging through Egypt to the Suez Canal.

And it came just a few months after the fall of Singapore,

an equally humiliating British surrender,

this time to the Japanese.

It was less than two years since Churchill's "finest hour",

when his defiance of Hitler had inspired the Battle of Britain.

How had it come to this?

To understand why the surrender of Tobruk

was so shattering for Churchill,

we have to examine the massive challenges Britain faced

in the early years of the war and go back to the hidden story of 1940.

-CHURCHILL:

-'The Battle of Britain is about to begin.'

'Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island

'or lose the war.'

Churchill's rhetoric in 1940 was all about defending Great Britain

and celebrating its island story.

But this was for public morale at home.

In reality, Churchill believed Britain's fate would be decided

by events thousands of miles away.

We can see this in one of the boldest decisions of 1940,

now almost totally obscured by the hype about the Battle of Britain.

Churchill and his War Cabinet decided to ship half Britain's tanks

to another continent - to Egypt.

Egypt?

To us in the 21st century, that decision seems utterly crazy,

because we think of Britain as an offshore European island.

But, back in 1940, the mindset was very different.

Britain was still seen as a global power,

and its leaders knew it was the Empire that enabled the British

to punch way above their weight in the world arena.

Without the Empire, Great Britain would be Little England.

The supreme imperialist was Churchill himself.

As a young soldier, he had defended the frontiers of empire

in India, the Sudan and South Africa.

Even when Britain was faced with invasion,

Churchill thought globally, not locally.

In 1940, it wasn't just the British Isles that were in jeopardy,

but the whole British Empire,

through the Middle East and out to India,

because the Empire's main artery, the Mediterranean,

was in danger of being severed.

As France collapsed in June 1940, Italy, Britain's upstart rival

in the Mediterranean, entered the war on Germany's side.

For the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini,

this was an electric moment.

Fascist Italy posed a genuine threat to the British Empire

in the Middle East.

Jutting right out into the Mediterranean,

it had a powerful navy and significant colonies

in Libya and Abyssinia.

Mussolini, strutting amid the monuments of past imperial grandeur,

hoped to piggy-back to glory on the shoulders

of Hitler's victory over France.

Mussolini reckoned that Britain's crisis would allow his army

to march unopposed from Libya eastward all the way to Cairo,

devouring Egypt, heartland of the once-great empire of the Pharaohs

and now a vital part of the British empire.

"The loss of Egypt will be the coup de grace for Great Britain",

Mussolini boasted.

For the British, the critical threat was to the Suez Canal,

which linked Britain to the oilfields of the Persian Gulf

and on to India and Australia.

Supplies and men from the empire

were essential for Britain's war effort.

All Britain's oil and over half its food had to be imported.

Loss of the Mediterranean would add several weeks

onto voyages from the Far East,

exposing scarce merchant ships to attacks from the German U-boats.

That's why Churchill risked reinforcing Egypt,

even while Britain itself was facing imminent invasion.

What looked like a dangerous British gamble proved a spectacular success.

Mussolini jumped into war, only to fall flat on his face.

Italy's army was totally unprepared for a serious war.

The British counter-attacked,

winning cheap and resounding victories, advancing from Egypt

and driving deep into the Italian colony of Libya.

But then Hitler came to Mussolini's aid.

In February 1941, he sent an ace general, Erwin Rommel,

to North Africa, along with good tanks and elite troops.

Rommel was a leader who loved to attack

and was ready to take huge risks,

sometimes even against his official orders from Berlin.

Under Rommel, Germany's Afrika Korps turned the tide

and started to drive the British back along the road towards Cairo.

By the beginning of 1942,

the British position in North Africa was once again in jeopardy.

Britain could not afford to lose Egypt.

But holding it against a formidable military machine

was a massive problem, because the British Army was the weakest link

in the country's war effort.

The question was, could the soldiers deliver?

'To really grasp Britain's predicament in North Africa in 1942,

'even before the disaster at Tobruk,

'we have to understand Churchill's great underlying fear.

'That he had an army that could not win.'

Britain was haunted by history.

Such was the public fear of a repeat of the carnage of the Great War -

the Somme and Passchendaele - that the 1914 acronym BEF,

British Expeditionary Force,

was banned from official documents all through the 1930s.

British leaders put resources into the air force and navy,

not the army, because they were sure the public would not accept

another land war on the continent of Europe.

They expected French soldiers would do most of the fighting

in any future war against Germany.

The fall of France in 1940 shredded those illusions.

Now Churchill had to create a mass conscript army almost from scratch.

That meant training green troops

to fight battle-hardened German veterans,

providing them with decent equipment, especially tanks,

and finding generals who could match German commanders like Rommel.

Sir Alan Brooke, Churchill's Chief of the Imperial General Staff and

supremo of the army, mused gloomily about the magnitude of the task.

"Half our Corps and Divisional Commanders are totally unfit

"for their appointments,

"and yet if I were to sack them I could find no better!"

"The reason for this state of affairs is to be found in the losses

"we sustained in the last war of all our best officers,

"who should now be our senior commanders."

Between 1940 and 1942, poorly commanded, ill-equipped

and under-trained,

the British army had suffered a series of catastrophic defeats.

Norway, Dunkirk, Greece, Crete, Singapore,

became bywords for evacuation and humiliation.

Now people joked BEF stood for Back Every Friday.

Churchill was impatient.

As an ex-soldier, he knew that the only real way

to train men how to fight was by fighting,

and as a political leader, he understood that you couldn't

sustain public morale indefinitely by big words about future success.

The only place where the British were really fighting the Germans

was in colonial North Africa.

Britain's whole war effort had become hostage to a desert victory,

and so had the fate of Britain's war leader.

In 1942, Rommel was at the gates, the Empire was crumbling,

and the army was floundering.

Worse still, Churchill's leadership was now being questioned.

Discontent was brewing about his "dictatorial" ways

and his "midnight follies" when he tried to impose his ideas

on exhausted aides.

Increasingly, even his chief adviser, Brooke, complained

at having to manage what he called Churchill's "impetuous nature".

Twice in six months, Churchill, had to fend off votes of no confidence

in the House of Commons.

Winston, MPs muttered, was yesterday's man.

A titan in crisis of 1940, but now running out of steam

and lacking a vision to shape the peace.

The up and coming men, it was whispered around Westminster,

were the progressive Tory, Anthony Eden,

and especially the radical left-winger, Stafford Cripps.

'Sir Stafford Cripps signs for His Majesty's Government.'

Stafford Cripps was everything Churchill couldn't stand -

socialist, religious and, perhaps most horrific of all, vegetarian.

But Cripps offered a radically different vision

of how to win the war,

which caught the public mood in those tired,

fractious months of 1942.

'Now over to London, where one of the biggest ever crowds assembles

'in Trafalgar Square for an "All Aid to Russia" demonstration.'

Cripps demanded massive aid for the Russians,

whose Red Army was really taking on the Germans,

unlike, it seemed, the British army.

Above all, Cripps did not share Churchill's passionate,

romantic imperialism.

In fact, he was demanding a firm timetable

for giving independence to India.

I feel quite certain that the scheme I'm taking with me to India

is one which may successfully settle for all time the future

of India as a great, free partner in the British Commonwealth of Nations.

Cripps posed a fundamental challenge to Churchill's view of Empire.

Cripps understood that if Britain claimed to be fighting for freedom,

she could not hold 400 million people

on the other side of the world in imperial bondage.

For Churchill, the sun would never set on the British Empire.

For Cripps, the twilight was already closing in.

In early 1942, the idea of empire was being battered

not just by politicians like Cripps,

but by the subject peoples themselves,

and nowhere more so than in Egypt.

As in India, nationalist protests

were challenging British imperial rule.

But here, Rommel's desert army had emboldened Egypt's king

and his supporters, and they were backed by crowds who thronged

the streets chanting, "Down with the English!" and, "Long live Rommel!"

The British Ambassador was Sir Miles Lampson.

Six foot five and and 18 stone - a bluff, burly figure,

quite ready to throw his weight around.

Lampson wanted to shore up the situation

with a firmly pro-British government,

but Egypt's young playboy king, Farouk, tried to defy him.

So Lampson decided to show the "boy",

as he privately called King Farouk, just who was boss.

'Lampson drove down to the Royal Palace

'at the head of an armoured convoy.'

'As British tanks and troops ringed the building,

'he marched in, barging aside the King's Chamberlain,

'and gave Farouk an ultimatum - play ball or abdicate.'

'A new pro-British government was quickly installed.'

This tough-guy act worked, but only for the moment.

Ultimately, the British Empire was a con trick,

depending on prestige rather than power.

There simply weren't enough soldiers and administrators

to keep order if the colonial millions

decided to challenge British rule.

Rommel's triumphant army gave the Egyptians their cue.

Only a decisive desert victory could save the British empire.

But instead of victory,

what came next was that worst of all defeats.

The humiliation at Tobruk.

In June 1942, the pink telegram,

thrust into Churchill's hand in the White House,

summed up in a few words his anguish, and that of Britain.

The fragility of the empire, the failure of the army,

and his own inability as a leader

to deliver the victory he had promised back in 1940.

On that grim morning, the only saving grace for Churchill

was the generosity of his American allies.

There were no recriminations.

President Roosevelt simply asked, "What can we do to help?"

In the bleak crisis of mid-1942, relations between Britain

and America provided Churchill's only bright spot.

Churchill was trying to build what he called a "special relationship".

The two governments were forging a uniquely close alliance.

The two leaders were exchanging dozens of personal messages

every week, and meeting every few months.

'On one occasion, when Churchill was staying in the White House,

'Roosevelt entered his room unannounced,

'only to find his British guest emerging wet and glowing

'from the bathroom, draped only with a scanty towel.'

'FDR started to withdraw, but Churchill beckoned him in.'

"The Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to conceal

"from the President of the United States."

But however cosy the special relationship seemed in 1942,

it was impossible to hide the nakedness of British power.

Surging on from Tobruk, by August 1942,

Rommel's army was only 100 miles from Cairo.

Churchill blamed the retreat in North Africa

on the British commander, Claude Auchinleck.

In desperation, he flew out to Egypt and sacked Auchinleck

and his senior staff.

To head the new team, he appointed Brooke's protege,

General Bernard Montgomery.

Yet Monty was not entirely Churchill's cup of tea.

On one occasion, Churchill visited Monty and watched some manoeuvres.

Afterwards, the two men had lunch in Monty's field caravan.

Monty was a lean, austere man and the food was pretty Spartan,

washed down only with water.

Churchill made clear his displeasure,

and Monty replied defensively,

"Prime Minister, I neither smoke nor drink and am 100% fit."

Churchill glowered back...

.."I smoke and drink and am 200% fit."

But Monty had the charismatic manner and leadership skills

that his predecessors lacked.

He worked on basic training and made clear

that there would be no more retreats.

'I have ordered that all plans and instructions

'dealing with further withdrawal are to be burnt and at once!

'We will stand and fight here.

'If we can't stay here alive, then let us stay here dead.

'I want to impress on everyone that the bad times are over.

'They are finished.'

'This breezy confidence was infectious,

'and Monty's informality endeared him to the troops.'

According to anecdote,

as Monty's jeep was passing one British unit,

a soldier, wearing a top hat but otherwise completely naked,

doffed the hat to his commander.

This was too much, even for Monty. and he issued a blunt order.

"Top hats will not be worn in the Eighth Army."

But Monty was no superman.

In fact, he reaped the benefits of the hard work put in by Auchinleck,

who had built up a force that halted Rommel's advance

at the desert outpost of Alamein.

Slowly and painfully, the British army was learning how to fight.

By October, Monty was ready to attack in strength.

He now had real superiority over Rommel,

with double the troops, tanks and guns,

while his enemy was starved of supplies, especially petrol.

'The great point to remember is that we're going to finish

'with this chap Rommel once and for all.'

'There was one other reason for Monty's confidence.

'He had a new secret weapon, thanks to work being done here

'at Bletchley Park, a quiet country house 50 miles north of London,

'that had become the nerve centre of British code-breaking.'

'The Germans used Enigma machines like this one

'to encode their messages.

'At first glance, it looked like a small typewriter in a wooden box,

'but it employed teethed wheels and telephone-style plug-boards

'to encode messages in almost endless variety.

'158 million million million possibilities.

'Penetrating the Enigma was a monumental task.

'It took painstaking labour, huge strokes of luck

'and enormous ingenuity by the academics at Bletchley.'

The information generated by the code-breakers was known as Ultra.

What mattered was not only decrypting and translating

the signals quickly, but getting the information out

to field commanders in time for it to be used in battle.

In the autumn of 1942, GHQ in Cairo set up Special Liaison Units

charged with putting Ultra to good use.

So Monty was the first Desert General

who was able to exploit Ultra.

He knew the state of Rommel's dispositions.

Ultra also helped the RAF to target German convoys

across the Mediterranean, and German air bases in North Africa,

strangling Rommel's supply lines.

Yet, even with all the advantages of Ultra,

the battle of Alamein still had to be won by hard, bloody fighting.

The battle opened on 23rd October

with a spectacular artillery barrage,

which Monty likened to "a Great War 1914/18 attack".

But the Afrika Korps had laid nearly half a million mines, so clearing

paths through the minefields took time,

and what Monty had envisaged as a quick tank battle

turned into an infantry slogging match

by British and Commonwealth forces,

which for over a week seemed in the balance.

'Here's some excellent news which has come during the past hour.'

'The Axis forces in the Western desert, after 12 days and nights

'of ceaseless attacks by our land and air forces, are now in full retreat.

'It's known that the enemy's losses in killed and wounded

'have been exceptionally high.'

CHURCH BELLS RING

Church bells rang out across Britain in celebration of this first

victory by the British army over the Germans.

For Churchill, Alamein was redemption

for the purgatory of Tobruk.

Suez and the artery of empire were now secure.

At last, the British army had learned how to win,

at last, the British people had something to celebrate.

And, what's more, Churchill's own political position was now confirmed

for the rest of the war.

For weeks beforehand,

Stafford Cripps had been threatening to resign from the Cabinet

over Churchill's mismanagement of the war.

Once Churchill gained his victory, Cripps no longer posed a threat.

He did resign, but it was now a damp squib rather than a big bang.

For the British public and the wider world,

Churchill played up Alamein

as a decisive turning point of the whole war.

And that's how we tend to remember it today.

But in reality, this was another piece of British spin.

Talk of "exceptionally high" Axis casualties was an exaggeration.

2,100 Germans and Italians were killed.

The British death toll was 2,300.

And although more than 30,000 of the enemy were taken prisoner,

Monty's caution in the pursuit allowed Rommel

and much of his Afrika Korps to get away, and fight another day.

Contrast this with the great turning point on the Eastern Front,

Stalingrad, where the battle was also decided in November 1942,

when the Russian pincers closed around the Germans.

Around half a million soldiers had been killed on both sides.

The Russians netted over 100,000 prisoners...

..among them 22 generals,

including the supreme German commander, Friedrich Paulus.

BELLS RING

No wonder the bells also rang out from the Kremlin.

Stalingrad marked the turn of the Nazi tide in the East,

the beginning of a long and bloody retreat to Berlin.

It also signalled the rise of a new imperial threat

to the British Empire,

much more significant than Mussolini's tinpot Roman empire.

As Russia bludgeoned its way west,

America was beginning to mobilise its vast resources.

Both now had the power to challenge Churchill's focus

on the Mediterranean.

"The only thing worse than fighting with allies

"is fighting without them."

That was Churchill's lament all through the war

when dealing with the Russians and even the Americans.

But the hard truth was that the British Empire needed

the support of allies to win the war.

The problem was that this support would undermine the very empire

that Churchill was fighting to protect.

'The freedom we fought for in 1776,

'Britain has since been freely given to Canada...

'..Australia...

'New Zealand...'

For most Americans, "empire" was a dirty word.

They had fought a bloody war of independence to escape

from the British Empire, and prided themselves

on not being a colonial power, unlike the nations of Europe.

'Of course, no-one ever talks about the British Empire today

'without mentioning India,

'and men of goodwill in Britain as well as other countries

'have been outspoken in their demands for Indian freedom,

'for no man who believes in democracy

'can support foreign rule of any people.'

To Roosevelt and the Americans,

Churchill embodied an archaic world order.

British domination of places like Egypt and India

were seen as Victorian relics that had to be swept away.

US leaders were sure that they were fighting a war

for high principle, to spread American democratic values

across the globe.

The tension over empire was revealed dramatically in April 1942,

when the nationalist campaign in India was reaching a crescendo.

Roosevelt leaned hard on the Prime Minister

to come out for Indian independence.

Churchill was furious and, in effect, threatened to resign,

unless the President stopped interfering

in what he saw as a British issue.

"I could not be responsible for a policy which would throw

"the whole sub-continent of India into utter confusion

"while the Japanese invader is at its gates.

"I should personally make no objection at all

"to retiring into private life."

The transatlantic wrangling over empire

was not only disturbing relations between the two leaders.

It was also poisoning discussions between the generals

over how to beat the Germans.

For many American commanders,

the Mediterranean campaign looked like a selfish diversion

by the imperialist Brits to bolster their own power in Egypt.

It also seemed a completely stupid strategy.

The American Army Chief of Staff, George Marshall,

operated on the basis of simple geometry, insisting that,

since the shortest distance between two points was a straight line,

the best route from London to Berlin

was through France, via Dover to Calais.

'We have our men all through the Pacific.

'They are landing in Ireland and England.

'And they will land in France.'

George Marshall was already a legend in Washington.

A career army officer renowned for honesty,

candour and organisational skill.

Unlike many American generals, he had no political ambitions

and didn't even vote in elections for fear of colouring his judgment.

Marshall was also a match for his own President.

Franklin Roosevelt was a consummate politician, charming all around him

with seductive words while keeping his own counsel.

FDR once remarked in a rare moment of candour,

"I'm a juggler. I never let my right hand know what my left hand does,

"and furthermore, I am perfectly willing to mislead

"and tell untruths if it will help win the war."

Yet Marshall was never drawn into Roosevelt's political web.

He deliberately kept FDR at a distance,

refusing to let the President call him "George", and insisting,

"I want the right to say what I think

"and it will often be unpleasing."

Marshall was quite clear about the need for an early

Second Front in France, and he told Roosevelt so repeatedly.

In April 1942, Marshall arrived in London to present his plans

for crossing the Channel,

certainly in 1943, and ideally later in 1942.

British commanders, mindful of the Great War, thought this was crazy.

Brooke spoke scathingly about Marshall building

"castles in the air".

But anxious not to blatantly oppose their new ally,

Churchill and Brooke played a masterful game.

The Prime Minister praised Marshall's "momentous proposal"

and said he "cordially agreed".

He spoke expansively about "complete unanimity on the framework".

The two nations, he said,

"would march ahead together in a noble brotherhood of arms".

But Churchill mentioned "one broad reservation". It was, he said,

"essential to carry on the defence of India and the Middle East".

In other words, Churchill was determined to keep on fighting

in the Mediterranean.

For the moment, Churchill was senior partner in the alliance.

Such was America's unreadiness for war

and the demands of the Pacific

that the US Army could only offer a couple of divisions

for any cross-Channel attack in 1942.

The bulk of the troops would have to be British and Canadian.

This gave Churchill a veto power over what appeared in London

to be a suicide mission.

As a way of appeasing the Americans and the Russians,

the British mounted a small-scale,

lightning raid on the Channel port of Dieppe in August 1942.

But it turned into a complete disaster,

with the Canadian 2nd Division losing 70% of its men.

With this tragic vindication, Churchill managed to ward off

any idea of a full-scale cross-Channel attack in 1942.

But he still needed to satisfy the pressure from Washington

and Moscow for some kind of second front that year.

If not France, then where?

During the Great War, Churchill had revolted against the stalemate

on the Western Front by proposing a campaign in the Mediterranean

to knock out Germany's junior ally, the Ottoman Turks.

The half-baked landings at Gallipoli

almost destroyed his political career,

but Churchill never lost his conviction that the Mediterranean

was the theatre where a decisive breakthrough could be made.

But in 1942, he had to persuade his new allies.

In August, Churchill became the first Allied leader

to fly to Moscow to meet Stalin face to face.

Churchill saw himself as the broker between East and West.

In the Kremlin, he condensed his strategy into a simple image.

Sketching the outline of a crocodile,

he told Stalin that France was Hitler's hard snout

but the Mediterranean was the "soft underbelly" of the Axis.

That was where the Allies should make their first stab.

The "soft underbelly" was a brilliantly seductive idea.

Churchill presented it as common sense, sound strategy.

But in reality, it masked his fears

about the weakness of the British army,

and it also suited Britain's interests very well,

because it would eliminate the British Empire's rivals

in the Mediterranean.

But would the Americans buy it?

Marshall was not taken in by the soft underbelly.

But he wasn't America's Commander-in-Chief,

and he wasn't a politician.

President Roosevelt was determined to mount some kind of offensive

against Germany in 1942, above all to head off political opponents

who wanted to focus on the war against Japan in the Pacific.

For FDR, the opinion polls were alarming, indicating that 20%

of Americans were inclined to sign a peace with Hitler so they

could concentrate on getting revenge on the Japanese for Pearl Harbor.

To put it bluntly, Roosevelt needed American blood to be shed

by the Germans so his people would feel committed to the European war.

And, as a politician, he really wanted the action to start

before the midterm elections of November 1942.

So the President simply overruled Marshall.

He gave the go-ahead for Operation Torch - an invasion of Morocco

and Algeria by American and British troops,

to attack Rommel from the rear as he retreated from Alamein.

For his own political reasons,

Roosevelt had bought in to Churchill's grand idea.

In 1942, the soft underbelly became the Allies' compromise strategy.

For better and for worse, there would be real military benefits,

but also lasting consequences for the post-war world.

To keep the American military sweet, Churchill let Roosevelt and Marshall

propose a commander of the combined American and British forces

for the Torch landings.

The choice was between two up-and-coming generals,

Dwight Eisenhower and Mark Clark.

Clark was shrewd and meticulous,

but also relentlessly ambitious and deeply insecure.

"The higher you climb the flagpole," he once said,

"the more of your ass is exposed."

He was also congenitally suspicious of the Brits.

"Ike" was junior to Clark and, as Brooke caustically remarked,

he'd never even commanded a battalion in action.

But he had priceless assets for the role

of commanding an alliance of nations.

A ready smile, a gregarious manner and, above all,

total commitment to making the Anglo-American alliance really work.

Eisenhower dealt ruthlessly with all

who took a narrowly nationalist view.

One American officer was sent home for insulting a British officer.

The Brit tried to intercede: "Sir, he only called me an SOB."

Ike was unmoved.

"I understand he called you a British SOB."

"That is quite different. My ruling stands."

It was Ike who got command of Torch, and he would never look back.

The Torch landings were the greatest amphibious assault

in history to date, dwarfing Gallipoli in 1915.

And they went far better than that disaster,

which had blackened Churchill's name in the Great War.

For now, Churchill's soft underbelly strategy appeared to be working.

The Americans were onside, the Germans seemed to be on the run.

Hopes were high that, by Christmas 1942,

the Allies would reach Tunis and squeeze Rommel out of North Africa.

These hopes were not mere illusion.

Drawing on what he called his "golden eggs",

the daily decrypts from Ultra,

Churchill believed that the Germans were about to cut their losses

in North Africa and pull out.

The question was, could Ultra always be taken at face value?

The code-breakers, for all their brilliance,

were limited by the military messages on which they worked.

Bletchley Park could shed little light

into the manic mind of Adolf Hitler.

Determined not to be humiliated, in November 1942,

the Fuhrer performed a dramatic U-turn...

..and decided to make a stand in Tunisia...

..rushing in fresh troops and supplies.

Hitler's last-ditch reinforcements enabled the Germans to hang on

in Tunisia, until the rains came and the sandy tracks turned to mud.

The months of desert war that followed

at least gave American soldiers valuable battle experience.

Roosevelt and Marshall had been faced with the task of creating

an army even more quickly than Churchill and Brooke.

'Boy, do I remember breaking in them first GI shoes.

'We learnt quick it was a fighting outfit

'from that rugged training we got here and overseas.'

Troops had to be trained and supplied, and, equally important,

taught how to fight with Allies.

Many GIs got a bad name among the British

for their high pay and brash confidence.

There were punch-ups in British pubs after GIs used lines like,

"Gimme a beer as quick as you guys got out of Dunkirk."

The real war therefore came as a rude shock.

In February 1943, American forces at the Kasserine Pass

in the Tunisian mountains were routed by Rommel

in a surprise attack.

The green GIs, badly led, were forced back 85 miles in seven days,

one of the worst American defeats of the war.

Eisenhower reported to Marshall,

"Our people, from the very highest to the lowest,

"have learned that this is not a child's game."

The story was played down in America,

but there was considerable malicious satisfaction in Britain.

The Great War song The Yanks Are Coming

was heard again with new words - The Yanks Are Running.

# Over there, over there

# Send the word, send the word

# Over there

# That the Yanks are coming

# The Yanks are coming

# The drums rum-tumming everywhere. #

4,000 Allied prisoners were taken at Kasserine,

and to add to America's humiliation,

some of the GIs were shipped to Italy

and marched as a spectacle through Rome.

# And we won't come back

# Till it's over over there. #

With the North African campaign dragging on,

British and American leaders met in Casablanca

to discuss what they could salvage from this setback.

Churchill and Brooke were quite clear.

Finish the job in North Africa,

and then continue to stab at the soft underbelly

by targeting Hitler's weaker partner, Italy.

Marshall could see the way things were going.

He grumbled that the Mediterranean was turning into a "suction pump".

But, bogged down in Tunisia, the Americans were in a weak position

to argue and British military planners ran rings around them.

One US general commented, "We came, we saw, and we were conquered."

After months of muddy stalemate, the Allies re-grouped,

and in May 1943, they finally captured Tunis.

The haul was immense.

Some 250,000 prisoners, including a dozen German generals.

North Africa had finally been cleared of enemy troops

and the Mediterranean was now open to Allied shipping.

'But although the Americans talked up the victory as "Tunisgrad",

'it came six months too late.

'That half year since Alamein and Stalingrad

'was of decisive importance.'

'The Red Army was now surging west, while total victory in North Africa

'came too late to change Anglo-American strategy for 1943.'

Marshall was still pushing

for a cross-Channel invasion to be given priority.

But was he right?

It's clear from the Dieppe disaster that the Allies could not

have established a firm foothold in France in 1942.

They might have in 1943, but only if they had done nothing

in North Africa in order to build up troops and resources

here in Britain.

Even then, it would have been very iffy,

because the Allies had not yet gained clear supremacy in the air

against the Luftwaffe,

or control of the Atlantic supply lines against the U-boats.

What's certain is that the failure to clear North Africa,

as hoped, by the end of 1942 made it virtually impossible

to cross the Channel in strength in 1943.

So Churchill and Brooke's Mediterranean strategy

continued to triumph, by default.

With no option of attacking France, the Americans were persuaded

to beach-hop from Africa to Sicily in July 1943.

'We have a good plan.

'There can only be one end to this next battle

'and that is another success.

'Forward to victory. Let us knock Italy out of the war.'

This was more Monty bravado.

The Sicily landings were a mess, and three German divisions

gave two far-superior Allied armies

a hard, month-long battle, inflicting 20,000 casualties.

More disturbing still, co-operation between

the British and American commanders was breaking down.

Monty and the British, still sceptical about the quality

of the GIs after Kasserine, tried to sideline the US forces.

But while Monty's Eighth Army worked its way slowly through Sicily

in brutal battles, an American rival surged across the island

in a series of dashing tank offensives.

"Goddamn, all the British!" fumed General George Patton.

"I'd rather be commanded by an A-rab!"

Patton treated the campaign in Sicily

as what he called a "horse race" with Monty,

insisting that "the US must win, not as an ally, but as a conqueror".

Despite the Allies' bickering,

Churchill's strategy still appeared to be paying off.

With Sicily invaded, Mussolini was toppled in a political coup.

The Italians surrendered and tried to side with the Allies.

But the Germans now moved in to occupy Italy.

Churchill was convinced it was vital to get into Italy

before Hitler consolidated his hold.

This was a decisive moment.

Up till now, Churchill's soft underbelly strategy had paid off.

The Mediterranean, the artery of empire, was secure,

and British armies had learned how to fight

without getting into a bloodbath like the Somme.

But now a bright idea would become a dark obsession.

Increasingly for Churchill, the Mediterranean would become

not a means to an end, but the end in itself.

He expected Italian-controlled islands in the Aegean

to fall quickly into British hands.

With such rich pickings on offer,

Churchill was ready to put Operation Overlord,

the invasion of France, on hold.

This is clear from a top secret meeting in October 1943,

which reveals just how far Churchill was willing to go

in deceiving his American allies.

Churchill told the British Chiefs of Staff his priorities would now be,

"One. To reinforce the Italian theatre to the full.

"Two. To enter the Balkans.

"Three. To hold our position in the Aegean Islands.

"Four. To build-up our air forces

"and intensify our air attacks on Germany.

"Five. To encourage the steady assembly in this country

"of United States troops, with a view to taking advantage

"of the softening in the enemy's resistance

"due to our operations in other theatres,

"though this might not occur until after the spring of 1944."

Plodding bureaucratic words, you might think,

but actually diplomatic dynamite.

Churchill was saying that the British, given a free hand,

would put crossing the Channel

at the bottom of their list of priorities.

His sweet talk about Overlord

was simply to jolly along the Americans.

And there's that telling phrase about building up US troops

in Britain to take advantage

"of a softening in enemy resistance elsewhere".

Here again, Churchill was following British imperial tradition.

The empire had always preferred to wage a war of attrition

rather than fight direct.

It had taken 20 years to beat Napoleon,

and for much of that time the British army had been

deployed in Spain while the Russians slogged it out with the French.

Churchill shunned going head-to-head with a full-strength German army.

Better to wear the enemy down by squeezing the Mediterranean

and ratcheting up the bombing until Hitler's Reich began to crack.

Crossing the Channel would simply be finishing the job.

Churchill's obsession with penetrating the soft underbelly

was not completely mad-cap.

He found support for his strategy in intelligence reports

from Bletchley that suggested that the Germans were ready

to throw in the towel in Italy.

Ultra indicated that, once the Allies got established

on the toe of Italy,

the Germans would pull back north towards the Alps.

That would give the Allies some excellent Italian airfields

from which to bomb the industrial cities of southern Germany.

But, once again, Ultra couldn't get into the crevices of Hitler's brain.

In October 1943, faced with the humiliation of losing Rome,

the Fuhrer performed another about-turn

and instructed his generals to fight for the Imperial City.

And so Italy, like Tunisia, became a protracted, grinding struggle.

This time, the mountainous terrain was ideal for the German defenders.

Italy's Apennine range is over 800 miles long,

some 80 miles wide, and it rises to 4,000 feet,

so the soft underbelly turned out to have a rocky spine.

After the war, one German general offered a friendly piece of advice.

"Next time you're invading Italy, don't start at the bottom."

The British and Americans battled their way north, but autumn rains

and winter snow then made movement almost impossible for months on end.

Churchill had predicted that Italy would be a springboard

for the Allies.

Instead, as he grimly admitted, it turned out to be a "sofa"

on which they got well and truly stuck.

The Americans were blunter.

General Mark Clark said that the soft underbelly turned out

to be "a tough old gut".

Churchill blustered that the Allies

were diverting German troops from France.

In fact, it was the other way round.

The Germans were diverting the Allies from the real Second Front.

With bloody fighting at Salerno, Ortona and the Rapido River,

Italy was turning into a costly sideshow.

The situation was even worse in the Aegean,

which Churchill had expected to mop up.

In fact, the Germans moved in first.

On the island of Leros, a small but determined German unit

overcame a larger British force without much of a fight.

It seemed like Tobruk all over again.

Churchill kept clamouring for American help to hit back

and invade Rhodes, the German stronghold in the Aegean.

But now even Brooke snapped.

He considered Churchill's plan "sheer madness".

"The Americans are already desperately suspicious of him,

"and this will make matters far worse."

Brooke wanted all the Allied resources devoted to Italy,

rather than being dissipated around the Mediterranean.

The Prime Minister was isolated from even his closest military adviser.

As for Marshall, he had no interest in Italy and he was

enraged by Churchill's bombast about Rhodes, telling the PM to his face,

"Not one American soldier is going to die on that goddamn beach."

Marshall and Roosevelt were determined to push through

Operation Overlord, the invasion of France through Normandy,

in the spring of 1944.

They were now thoroughly fed up with Churchill's obsession

about the Mediterranean.

Overlord wasn't merely a strategy,

it had become a metaphor for who was on top in the special relationship.

Armed with evidence of Churchill's intrigues against the plans

for invading France, Marshall sent a blistering memo to Roosevelt,

insisting that "further indecision, evasion, and the undermining

"of agreements cannot be borne.

"The Prime Minister must be told that he must now give his

"unqualified support to Overlord, or else propose an acceptable

"alternate course of action to guarantee victory over Germany."

At the end of November 1943,

Churchill and Roosevelt met once again at Tehran.

But now they were joined for the first time by Stalin,

whose armies were rolling the Germans back

and had recently liberated the whole of the Ukraine.

Stalin was in a strong position and he knew it.

The Soviet leader had tolerated the Mediterranean strategy in 1942,

but he was furious that Churchill had kept it going during 1943.

He shared the American desire to pin Churchill down

on launching a second front in France in the spring of 1944.

In the opening session, Roosevelt made clear his view that the

"cross-Channel attack should not be delayed by any secondary operation."

Stalin was even blunter.

He said that Hitler was trying to keep as many Allied divisions

as possible in Italy, where no decision could be reached.

Better to strike at the heart of Germany

through an invasion of northern France.

It was two to one for Overlord.

Churchill was outvoted.

The press and newsreels captured pictures of the Big Three,

smiling and chatting as equals,

but privately Churchill muttered that the little British donkey

was caught between the Russian bear and the American elephant.

It was an apt image.

The two big beasts favoured the direct attack into Germany

because they had the strength to do so.

Stalin had masses of men, and didn't care how many he lost.

Roosevelt, as a leader of a democracy, had to be more careful,

but the Americans could bring to bear massive firepower.

Unlike Churchill, neither of them intended to wait

until the Third Reich had been softened up.

Next day, the shift of power got personal.

Stalin kept needling Churchill about whether the British

were serious about Overlord.

And Roosevelt took his side, in the hope of showing the Russians

that they weren't facing an Anglo-American bloc.

At dinner, Stalin remarked that to stop a third European war,

"at least 50,000 and perhaps 100,000 of the German High Command

"should be physically liquidated."

Churchill lost his cool.

"The British parliament and people

"will not tolerate mass executions."

FDR offered what he drily called a compromise.

How about shooting only 49,000?

At this point Churchill stomped out of the room in disgust.

"You are pro-German!" Stalin taunted.

Churchill, tired out, had over-reacted to the gallows humour,

but, at a deeper level, I think, he was venting his frustration

at Britain becoming the junior partner in the alliance,

now that the vast power of America and Russia had been fully mobilised.

The exertions of Tehran and the frustrations of Italy,

challenges to his basic world view,

brought Churchill to one of his lowest points of the war.

In mid-December, stopping off in Tunis en route back to Britain,

he contracted pneumonia and suffered two minor heart attacks.

For a day or two, there were fears for his life

and his wife flew out to be with him.

Churchill had driven himself too far,

but his collapse was not merely physical.

This was a leader who could begin to see the limits of his power

and that of the empire he'd vowed to preserve.

Yet Churchill remained a fighter.

As he recovered, his energy was still directed towards completing

the campaign in Italy and justifying his Mediterranean gamble.

In January 1944, Churchill persuaded the Americans

to retain landing craft earmarked for Normandy in the Mediterranean,

so he could mount a landing behind enemy lines at Anzio,

only 40 miles from Rome.

This was a last bold throw of the dice

to win a quick victory in Italy.

The landings were a complete success.

But the troops failed to move swiftly off the beachhead,

and were then hemmed in by German counter-attacks.

'Hello, BBC.

'Wilfred Vaughan Thomas speaking with Herbert Walden recording.

'That's the sound, the first sounds, of our own ack ack.

'The first bomb's going down. It's away to the left of us,

'but even back here the ground around is shaking viciously

'and Walden's recording truck is now rocking on its springs.'

The attack became bogged down as soldiers dug into ditches

and gullies that, in places, ran only 50 yards from the enemy lines.

Churchill blamed the sluggish American commander,

General John Lucas, for not racing towards Rome.

The Americans claimed that Churchill's plan

was flawed from the start.

Lucas wrote in his diary...

"The whole affair has a strong odour of Gallipoli,

"and apparently the same amateur is still on the coach's bench."

With no decisive breakthrough, the slugging match in Italy dragged on.

One of the most epic and tragic battles

took place at the German-held monastery of Monte Cassino,

which towered some 1,700 feet above the valley below.

Besieging this spectacular natural fortress

was the absurd culmination of the soft underbelly strategy.

A succession of "British" units - many of them actually Poles,

Indians, Canadians, New Zealanders - took terrible casualties

in courageous assaults on German positions.

The monastery itself was flattened by Allied bombers.

Later, the Allies bombed the town below.

But the rubble proved even better for its defenders.

The struggle for Cassino dragged on for five months

in rain and sleet, snow and mud.

Surveying the blasted landscape,

the German commander was reminded of the Great War, when he said,

"I experienced the same loneliness

"crossing the battlefield of the Somme."

Ironically, Churchill had created in Italy

what he wanted to avoid in France.

'Fighting has been severe in the extreme.

'Men fought till they dropped.

'Dropped exhausted, or dropped killed or wounded.

'They had to get through appalling mountain tracks with the Germans

'commanding them and pouring streams of fire upon them at every move.'

'You could, by day, remain alive only in a hole in the ground.

'To show yourself and move in daylight

'in these forward positions was death.'

'Eventually, a co-ordinated attack by Allied units

'did force the Germans to withdraw.

'The Poles, the most recklessly brave of Allied soldiers,

'had the honour of taking the remains of the monastery,

'for which over a thousand of their comrades had died.

'In late May 1944, American troops, now heavily reinforced,

'finally broke out of the Anzio beachhead.'

The Americans were ordered to drive east

in order to cut off the Germans, at last in retreat from Cassino.

But the commander of the breakout was Mark Clark.

Fuming at playing second fiddle to Eisenhower, and at being relegated

to a theatre of operations dominated by the Brits, Clark unilaterally

diverted troops of his US Fifth Army north-west to take Rome.

He wrote later, "We not only wanted the honour of capturing Rome,

"but we felt that we more than deserved it.

"We intended to see that the people back home knew that it was

"the Fifth Army that did the job

"and knew the price that had been paid for it."

Most of the Germans retreating from Cassino escaped to the north,

but Clark had won his prize.

Early on 5th June, he held a carefully-staged conference

with his senior staff on the Capitoline Hill,

surrounded by press and cameramen.

"Well, gentlemen," Clark declared with studied nonchalance,

"I didn't really expect to have a press conference here.

"I just called a meeting with my commanders

"to discuss the situation.

"However, I'll be glad to answer your questions.

"This is a great day for the Fifth Army."

No mention here of the troops of the British Empire or France

who'd helped make possible Clark's Roman triumph.

Even patriotic American pressmen were embarrassed.

One commented, "On this historic day, I feel like vomiting."

The soft underbelly had been Churchill's grand idea,

but the Americans had stolen the glory by taking the imperial city.

But having tried to deceive his American allies on strategy,

Churchill was in no position to complain

when they gave him the run-around on tactics.

In any case, Mark Clark's moment in the spotlight was short-lived.

Next day, the long-awaited Second Front,

led by his rival Dwight Eisenhower, opened for real in Normandy.

To his aides, the weary Prime Minister was still complaining

that Overlord had been "forced upon us by the Russians

"and the United States military authorities".

Yet, in public, Churchill put the best face on things,

and threw himself into preparations for D-Day.

But in private, fear about attacking the hard snout of the Axis

still gnawed at Churchill's belly.

In October 1943, he foresaw Overlord turning into

"a disaster greater than Dunkirk".

And on the night before D-Day,

Churchill dined alone pensively with his wife.

Just before going to bed, he turned to her.

"Do you realise that by the time you wake up tomorrow morning

"20,000 men may have been killed?"

'This is the BBC Home Service

'and here is a special bulletin read by John Snagge.

'D-Day has come.

'Early this morning, the Allies began the assault

'on the north-western face of Hitler's European fortress.'

Churchill's gloom was misplaced.

Total Allied casualties on D-Day - killed, wounded and missing -

were 10,000, not 20,000.

The generals had learned their trade

in the back waters of the Mediterranean.

'In the euphoria about the landings,

'the news from Rome was wiped off the front pages.

'Churchill's soft underbelly had become a mere appendix.

'The real drama was now being played out on beaches closer to home.'

Churchill the bulldog kept fighting Britain's corner.

But the Americans were now determined

to dictate strategy in the West.

In the battle across France and Germany,

they were the dominant partners.

Monty, hero of Britain's desert victory,

was now firmly under Eisenhower.

As Churchill sensed at Tehran,

the Big Three was becoming a thing of the past.

In a future increasingly defined by America and Russia,

British diplomats started talking sardonically about

"the Big Two and a Half".

Britain would soon be stripped of its imperial assets.

By 1945, the British position in India had become untenable,

and within two years, a Labour government, in which Stafford Cripps

was a leading member, would concede full Indian independence.

Mussolini, the last "Roman" emperor, ended his days strung upside down

by Italian partisans in a petrol station in Milan.

But he wasn't the only imperial visionary

whose dreams were shattered by the war.

In 1940, Churchill had been the voice of freedom,

echoing around the world.

But the war for freedom hastened the end of empire.

The decline and fall of Mussolini's Roman empire came quickly.

The British Empire had deeper foundations,

but these, too, were undermined by the Second World War.

The Battle of Alamein was a great victory, yes,

but what it really exposed were the limits of the British Empire

when faced with total, global war.

The Mediterranean strategy of gradually squeezing Germany,

rather than going for the jugular,

was an expression of weakness, not strength.

Eventual victory over the Axis depended on strong allies

like America and Russia,

with their own distinctive visions of the future.

In the entrails of the soft underbelly,

we can discern the death pangs of the British Empire.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd