During the first years of the Anglo-American alliance, it was often the British who got their way. At the London Conference in April 1942, Brooke and Churchill seem to have misled General George Marshall, the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, about the British intentions on an early landing in France. At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, it was decided that the Allies should invade Sicily, under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a decision that effectively postponed the planned invasion of Western Europe until 1944. The Casablanca agreement was in fact a compromise, brokered largely by Brooke's old friend Field Marshal Sir John Dill, Chief of the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington DC. "I owe him an unbounded debt of gratitude for his help on that occasion and in many other similar ones", Brooke wrote after the war.