The Last Edwardian

...But when, and by whom, was it decided to take two splendid armies, the U.S...

...In short, he fulfilled Plato's injunction that only those who disdain power should be permitted to exercise it, and this volume is a fascinating account of the often gallant day-by-day work of a Guardian...

...One might think the British Eighth Army was alone in Italy...

...Interestingly, so was JosipBrozTito: OnMarchll, 1943, concerned that Yugoslavia might be prematurely liberated by the Anglo-Americans, he sent top Partisan commanders Milovan Djil-as, Koca Popovic, and Vladimit Vele-bit to negotiate with the Nazis in Zagreb...

...None of this good news assuaged Macmillan or Alexander, who seemed totally obsessed with what might be called " the bear went over the mountain strategy...

...Macmillan's striking characterologi-cal assets cannot obscure severed defects...

...Whatever Harold Macmillan's drawbacks, they were matched—in spades —by his American counterparts, many of whom seemed to believe history began the day they were assigned a job...

...Went to Church, sermon too long...

...When, for example, Pope Pius names a new Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Macmillan casually comments that he should have chosen "Ronnie Knox,' an Oxford friend...

...His Diaries are a solid addition to the historical archives...

...Macmillan did understand the issue...

...Putting aside the question of whether Monsignor Ronald Knox could have run a two-car funeral (the threshold test for any archbishop), "Ronnie" was surely the greatest English Catholic intellectual since Newman...

...The "name dropping" is completely natural and in character, though...

...And once launched Dragoon was embarrassingly successful: Planners had calculated Marseilles and Toulon might hold out some 40 days...

...Understandably, given reasons we shall explore, he found Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon "a very strange book.' At the same time, he was constantly flying in terrible weather in uncomfortable aircraft...

...American policy-makers would surely find Macmillan's Diaries exotic: "Good God, the man read books...

...Americans have tended to be put off by the aura of snobbery enveloping the almost extinct species, but—unlike the attitudes of parvenu aristoi—this total self-assurance lacks the malice born of insecurity...

...Had the Allies gone on the strategic defensive south of Rome, while maintaining tactical offensives sufficient to keep the Wehrmacht from relaxing and shipping troops to the Russian Front, the Germans would have been left with the problem of feeding Rome, pacifying now easily armed antiFascist guerrillas, and worrying about flank attacks near Genoa or in the Balkans...

...Macmillan was 50 and somewhat incapacitated by his old wounds—aggravated during a 1943 takeoff accident that left him severely burned and bruised...

...Not only did they automatically burke this question, but when the invasion of Southern France (Anvil/Dragoon) was planned for August 1944 they countered with Operation Armpit: a shift of the allied armies to the right through Istria, presumably to reach Berlin via the Graz-Linz-Prague route...

...they surrendered on the 14th day...

...the Marquess of Hartington on the succession of his father to the Dukedom of Devonshire in 1938...

...Indeed, he tells his wife that he finds Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope far more satisfying than contemporary fiction, and he effortlessly throws in Latin and Greek lines for her edification...

...On January 11, 1945, he wrote: "The issue of the second half of the 20th century will not be monarchism v. republicanism, but a liberal and democratic way of life versus the 'proletariat dictatorship of the Left' and the police state.'" He threw his talents into saving Greece from a Stalinist coup...

...Similarly, you keep encountering "preppy'' nicknames: "Bobbety" turns out to be Viscount Cranborne, subsequently the Fifth Marquess of Salisbury...

...in fact, Dooley merely suggested a more appropriate title: "Alone in Cubia...

...He has paid his dues...

...There is no reason to believe that either of these able men ever wondered, "Sup-posewetakeallofltaly, wheredowego from there...

...Dooley's phrase and propose that Harold Macmillan change the title of his War Diaries: Politics and War in the Mediterranean 1943-1945 to "Alone in the Mediterranean...

...For most of his tenure he wore two hats: British Resident Minister and head of the Allied Control Commission, Italy...

...A 2,000 mile midwinter trip in an unheated, unpressurized C-54 with side-benches for the fortunate, I can testify, was no picnic for a 21-year-old...

...Yet, the hard fact is that Macmillan —later Prime Minister and currently, as the Earl of Stockton, demonstrating to Margaret Thatcher that a nonagenarian peer of the old breed of Tory Radicals can bloody up her technocrats— was and is an extraordinary man...

...Son of an eminent publisher, Balliol man, Guards officer thrice wounded in World War I, brother-in-law of the Duke of Devonshire, Macmillan's eccentricities should bring chuckles, not snorts...

...As his reaction to Koestler prefigured, though, he did not have an ideological warning system...

...that went with the territory...

...The Wogs," to borrow the Victorian aphorism, "begin at Calais...

...Macmillan says hisDiaries have been lightly edited to omit family matters, repetition, "and a very few remarks that might cause needless pain to living people...

...One could argue that he should be designated a historical monument: He is the last great Edwardian, an authentic aristocrat, seemingly born without self-doubt, with singular critical intelligence, personal incorruptibility, and that wonderful talent for letting people have his way...

...This after the British foray on Oran, and Charles de Gaulle's abortive raid on Dakar, to say nothing of Trafalgar...

...I have a hunch that when the editing was done General Mark Clark may still have been with us: Except for a reference onMarch29,1944, to(unsuc-cessful) plans to remove Clark from command of the Fifth Army, that vain second-rater is a nonperson here...

...This is not the place to examine in detail the intricate diplomatic and military maneuvers that often brought the British and Americans into collision on the role of the Mediterranean theater in World War II...

...Zigfried Kasche, the German minister, liked the deal, but Hitler put an end to it by announcing, "One does not negotiate with rebels—rebels must be shot...

...counterpart Robert Murphy left for London, ran the civilian side as Alexander did the military...

...Eddy Devonshire" turns out to be Macmillan's brother-in-law Edward Cavendish, 10th Duke of Devonshire, and "Moucher" is his Duchess...

...Dooley, the witty Irish protagonist of Finley Peter Dunne's columns in the early years of this century, once commented on Theodore Roosevelt's memoir of the Spanish-American War...

...Since his footnotes constitute a veritable necrology of fellow participants in the North African, Italian and Grecian campaigns, one wonders whom he spared...

...Nasty bit of business, heavy losses...

...I won't dwell either on the wisdom or insanity of our Vichy policy versus Churchill's...

...In addition, he had a " Bridge on the River Kwai Complex," a compulsion to do THE JOB right without questioning its fundamental merits...

...Fifth and the British Eighth, and send them crawling on their bellies up the length of Italy to be welcomed by well-placed German ,88s behind every ridge...

...Bill" Hartington, who married Kathleen Kennedy, turns out to be "William Cavendish, Earl of Burlington (1917-44...

...His upper-class Christianity in no way precluded casual, impersonal anti-Semitism...

...Even if we allow for a certain self-serving dimension of his Diaries (Dean Ache-son observed that no one who wrote up a "Memorandum of Conversation" with an opponent ever ended up on the short end of the argument) Macmillan comes through as the kind of British statesman who a century ago would have been managing India...

...Reading tht Diaries, I was reminded of a letter I had read somewhere years ago written by General Arthur Wellesley (later Duke of Wellington) to his family from Oporto, where he was battling one of Napoleon's crack marshals, Nicolas Soult: "On Sunday finally got Soult on the run...

...We can only say "Bravo" to his Lordship as in 1985 he transfixes the House of Lords with his jeremiads against the soulless, anonymous mandarins of modernity...

...Undoubtedly he enjoyed exercising power and was extremely good at it, but his whole background insured that he would never whore after it...

...At Casablanca, in January 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that Sicily (Operation Husky) would be the next Allied target after the pacification of North Africa...

...With Sicily bagged, it made strategic sense to cross the Strait of Messina and control "the boot": The 15th American Air Force, then bombing the Ploesti oil fields and other Eastern European targets from Bengazi, could operate far more effectively from Apulia (what little aid got to Warsaw in the 1944 Rising was flown from Foggia by Polish, American and South African volunteers...

...I think the answer is Macmillan's simple 19th-century bedrock Christianity, which endowed him with a nonliturgical but pervasive optimistic fatalism...

...This volume is therefore far more than a useful study of Allied Mediterranean policies from Operation Torch to the 1945 Communist insurrection in Greece...

...As best I can determine from the records, this decision made itself—that is, nobody thought to ask, "Why move north of the Rapido...

...I would simply note that we were mad to demand a cross-channel invasion in 1943 (I believe that was the only military proposal in four years where President Franklin D. Roosevelt overruled General George Marshall), and the British were equally out of their strategic tree arguing for a "peripheral strategy" against Hitler featuring an invasion of the "soft underbelly of Europe...

...By contrast, Dragoon had the merit of being targeted on the only "soft underbelly" in Europe: France between roughly Sfete and Toulon...

...It was a brief, concise review...

...A look at a topographic map should convince anyone of the scheme's lunacy—there are mountains everywhere...

...It is both a self-portrait of an exemplar of the virtues of pre-World War I British aristocracy and a vignette of a generational last hurrah, nicely symbolized by "Winston," "Anthony" and "Harold" settling the fate of Greece in 1945 around a table in Athens, fully backed by Macmillan's intimate friend "Alex"—General (later Field Marshal) Sir Harold Alexander, Supreme Allied Commander, Mediterranean Theater...

...They do not, however, resolve a historical mystery that has intrigued me for a quarter of a century: Was there ever a top-level decision to invade and conquer all of Italy...

...Old Boys," not "faceless bureaucrats," made policy...

...Not until he tangled with Tito in 1945 over the occupation of Istria did he realize that the Croatian was a full-blooded Communist warlord...

...The Partisans were taxied back and forth in a Luftwaffe plane, and on March 25 Djilas and Velebit paid another call to amplify their proposal...

...Macmillan was a wise, honorable and dedicated public servant, a man who would lay it on the line to "Winston" at his most irritable and figure he could always go back to publishing and his beloved family...

...Once the top American brass departed to prepare to invade Normandy, in command and control terms the Italian campaign became basically a "British show," and Macmillan, particularly after his U.S...

...The objective: to cooperate with the Wehrmacht against any Allied landing...

...What Englishman, for instance, would expect the French Navy in 1942 to rally to the Stars and Stripes and Union Jack and not fire upon the Allied armada...

...What sustained him...

...Not until he found himself besieged by Communist guerrillas, the ELAS, at the British Embassy in Athens did he appreciate the dedicated work of British Special Operations, Cairo (virtually a wholly owned subsidiary of the Comintern), in arming the Greek Communists...

...theSec-ond Baron Hardinge of Penshurst...

...When the War ended, Tito saw to it that Kasche—the witness—was summarily hanged...

...Suffice it to say that Macmillan was in on each of the disputes and shared Churchill's premises, including the launching of a "Second Front" in Italy...

...Idon'twanttoendonanegativenote...

...After all, the Diaries began as letters to the author's wife, nee Lady Dorothy Cavendish, who would hardly be impressed that her husband knew "Alec" Hardinge, King George VI's "Extra [!]Equerry" a.k.a...

...You begin to think, with some empirical basis, that Britain was run by an extended family, and—at another level —that Macmillan's close relationship with President John F. Kennedy hardly suffered from his having been Kathleen's uncle until Hartington's untimely death in the War...

...As he notes in candor, whoever "writes the minutes rules the world," and his day-to-day diary entries convey the impression that in the flux of naive Americans, conniving Italians, devious Frenchmen, meshuganah Greeks, and other strange breeds, Winston Churchill's Minister Resident in the Western Mediterranean remained a pillar of wisdom and sanity who somehow kept the Allies on the right track...

...The rationale was that this would open the Mediterranean to Allied shipping and free 225 warships for duty elsewhere...

...There is a temptation to echo Mr...

...That brings us to the other major failing of Edwardian statesmanship: Macmillan was born without ideological sensitivity, just as some people are born without color vision...