British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was in a cranky mood, although it wasn't entirely his fault, he thought. He was en route to Plymouth, England, to board his battlecruiser the HMS Renown to begin his own trip to Tehran. He wore a double-breasted sailor's suit with a sailor's cap and he had the beginnings of a bad cold, but his foul mood had less to do with that than with the intractable, unreasonable, short-sighted Americans. "I was feeling far from well," he wrote in his memoirs, which was true, but it was the war that had him down. Churchill promptly boarded his ship and went to bed, tossing about uncomfortably, disposed by his illness and his irritation with Roosevelt. This entire trip would come to no good unless the British could convince the President to abandon his ill-advised plan for a frontal attack on Germany. A landing in France would be but a 5-mile pinprick against a 2,000-mile wall of guns, poured concrete-and-steel, and more than a million German soldiers that stretched shoulder-to-shoulder from Denmark to Portugal. Even if they got through the daunting shore batteries and the Luftwaffe planes and got ashore, there were at least 11 combat hardened divisions of Wehrmacht soldiers --and scores of Panzer tanks -- ready to race forward and cut them to shreds.

If they were thrown back into the English Channel, what then? "The British cannot meet any further calls on our manpower, which are now fully deployed on war service," Churchill would later say to his compatriots. No, Roosevelt needed to come over to his view of things, which was to delay D-Day, chip away at the edges, weaken the German forces. Of course, there was more to all this than even that. England was broke, down to her last English Pound. The war with Germany had bled the British treasury dry and Churchill had about as much negotiating power as a pauper -- and nothing got in his craw more than being forced to kowtow. Yes, Britain had done what no one else had been able to do which was to hold back the Germans and for that the West was in their debt. America had responded in kind using every loophole possible to finance more ships and planes, guns and bullets until Pearl Harbor. fearing the Japanese attack would divert American attention from their own war against Germany, Churchill rushed over to Washington, D.

C. to forge an agreement that would coordinate the global war effort through an executive agency called the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Through various written accords that ensured, Churchill and Roosevelt bound themselves to agree on all combat plans and on the allocation of precious war resources until the Japanese and the Germans were defeated. "It was realized quickly that there would have to be complete integration of land, sea and air operations of the Allies if the war was to be fought with the greatest possible efficiency," said Admiral Leahy. "Without such unity of forces, the war would be protracted or possibly lost.".