Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (20 page)

If Churchill was taken aback, he did not show it. After all, Roosevelt had acknowledged that an invasion of Europe was not possible that year, and clearly something else would have to be done in the meantime with the twenty Allied divisions already in the Mediterranean. Whatever that something turned out to be, it would very likely create a momentum of its own, and after that, well … they would see. Though it seemed “imperative” to Churchill “to use our great armies to attack Italy,” he was willing to let the Combined Chiefs “thrash it out.” While they did, he joined Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins for an automobile trip to “Shangri-La,” the presidential summer retreat in the Catoctin Hills of Maryland (now Camp David). Passing through the Maryland town of Frederick en route, Churchill, who was a serious student of the American Civil War, remarked that it was in Frederick where the elderly Barbara Frietchie had defiantly flown the national flag above her door when Lee’s column of soldiers had marched through in 1862. That inspired Hopkins to recite the famous couplet from John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem about her: “Shoot if you must this old gray head, but spare your country’s flag she said.” There was a brief pause, and then, to the amazement of all, Churchill recited all thirty stanzas of the poem from memory, an astonishing display of recall—though he later acknowledged that he might have missed a line or two.
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Meanwhile, back in Washington the CCS took up the familiar issues. There were no surprises left, for the arguments were by now entirely predictable. The Americans, with Roosevelt’s chief of staff, Admiral William D. Leahy, in the chair, insisted upon a massive concentration of force in England for an attack across the Channel; the British, led by Alan Brooke, countered that no such attack was possible until at least the spring of 1944 and that something else must be done in the meantime. Brooke echoed
Churchill and emphasized the importance of “knocking Italy out of the war,” but the Americans were having none of it. It was a measure of Marshall’s growing impatience that he uncharacteristically snapped back that rather than “knocking Italy out of the war,” perhaps they should direct their attention to “knocking Germany out of the war.” He pointed out that “operations invariably created a vacuum in which it was essential to pour in more and more means.” Torch was supposed to have required a total of 185,000 U.S. soldiers, but there were now more than 400,000 American GIs in North Africa. Meanwhile, of the 279,000 American soldiers who had been shipped to England, fewer than 20,000 ground troops remained there because “all available U.S. resources had been sent to North Africa.” Both Torch and Husky had been approved “in order to do something this year while preparing for cross-Channel operations,” yet no meaningful preparations had been made. Given that, Marshall announced that the program sketched out by the British was “not acceptable to the United States.”
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The British argued that the realities of the shipping problem made any transfer of assets from North Africa to England virtually impossible. Indeed, the dearth of shipping continued to dominate any discussion of Allied plans. Fears that the Germans might cut the transatlantic supply lines had eased, thanks to stronger convoy escorts, accelerated shipbuilding in the States, and the tremendous advantage gained by having broken the code that the Germans used to vector U-boats toward Allied convoys. Nevertheless, there were continuous new demands on shipping in the Pacific, and in the Mediterranean, too, including the need to transport a million prisoners of war from North Africa at the rate of thirty thousand a month. Shipping was so scarce that the Allies felt compelled to decline a plea from seventy thousand Bulgarian Jews who sought rescue from the Axis, a decision that in hindsight would come to look especially callous. Eisenhower reported that he was “thirty ships short of what he needed” even to conduct Operation Husky. Where would the ships come from to reorient operations from the Mediterranean to England? The American answer was that they would simply build more. In fact, the Americans were now building new cargo ships—most of them Liberty ships—faster than the Germans could sink them (see chart). The anticipated availability of all that new shipping, nearly all of it built in the United States, gave the Americans significant leverage in the strategic debate.
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A
LLIED
S
HIPPING
L
OSSES VS
. C
ONSTRUCTION OF
N
EW
S
HIPS
, 1942–1944

Three days of wrangling changed few minds, and once again the conference ended with what was officially a compromise. Unlike previous compromises, however, in which the Allies had approved one or another peripheral attack and made a cross-Channel movement conditional upon circumstances, this time it was the other way around. The final agreement authorized a cross-Channel invasion of France with a firm target date of May 1, 1944, and it made the invasion of Italy, or any other Mediterranean operation, dependent on circumstances, leaving the decision to the judgment of the theater commander, Dwight Eisenhower. The agreement also acknowledged the importance of defeating “the U-boat menace” and granted King permission to conduct a campaign of “unremitting pressure against Japan,” a foot in the door that triggered what would become the Central Pacific Drive.
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It was significant that the “Draft of Agreed Decisions” included specific details. The cross-Channel force would consist of twenty-nine divisions. This was a much smaller force than Morgan had proposed, and smaller than either the forty divisions Churchill had suggested eighteen months earlier or the forty-eight divisions Marshall had envisioned for Roundup. Moreover, due to the limited sealift capability, Morgan was instructed to plan for an
initial
assault force of only three divisions. These early estimates would be subsequently revisited and modified. Nevertheless, it was the first time the Allies had agreed to commit a precise number of troops to an invasion on a specific date. Most important of all from the American viewpoint, the agreement specified that forces would be transferred from the Mediterranean back to England to form the core of this invasion force. If all of the pieces could be assembled—the men, the ships, the supplies, and especially the landing craft—the Allies would begin the great invasion on May 1, 1944.
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Churchill was not ready to throw in the towel. He had come to Washington to secure an agreement for the invasion of Italy, and because that decision had been delegated to Eisenhower, he now resolved to go to Algiers and sell the idea to Ike. He invited Roosevelt to come along. The president
demurred and suggested that Marshall should go instead. Three days later, Churchill and Marshall flew to Gibraltar, and then on to Algiers, where the British prime minister turned the full force of his personality on Eisenhower. Ike later acknowledged that “Churchill was at his eloquent best” during this visit. He was certainly persistent. Ike complained privately to his friend and naval aide, Harry Butcher, that it was physically exhausting to listen to Churchill relentlessly press his case over and over. Eisenhower was not averse to the idea of an Italian campaign. His concern was that it would inhibit future options. As Marshall had written him in a private letter, “an all out invasion of Italy inevitably presents very serious consequences in the way of shipping … which would put a stop to serious offensive operations elsewhere.” Ike wrote back: “My views agree completely with yours.” Even if an Allied invasion of Italy was fully successful, the need to keep the Italian nation fed and supplied with coal so that her people did not starve or freeze over the winter would further absorb scarce Allied shipping and thereby restrict European operations. In any case, Eisenhower reminded Churchill that their ability to do anything in the Mediterranean after Husky depended on how quickly and how efficiently Sicily could be taken. “If Sicily proved to be relatively easy,” he told the prime minister, a subsequent move into Italy might be possible, but if the battle for Sicily proved long and difficult, any such invasion was unlikely. Churchill remained his confident and ebullient self, telling Eisenhower that he “looked forward to having Christmas dinner with Ike in Rome.”
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In the end, Churchill got his way, mainly because the campaign in Sicily was remarkably successful. The initial landings on July 10 went so smoothly that Mountbatten, watching from offshore, thought “the whole show looked like a rehearsal.” Only twelve days later, Patton’s Seventh Army captured Palermo, on the Sicilian north coast, and two days after that, the Italian government effectively removed Mussolini from power with a vote of no confidence. Il Duce’s replacement, Prime Minister Pietro Badoglio, sent out peace feelers to the Allies, and on September 3, the same day an armistice was ratified, British forces crossed the narrow Strait of Messina into Italy. A week later, Kent Hewitt’s naval task force delivered Mark Clark’s mostly American Fifth Army to the beaches near Salerno, south of Naples, in what was code-named Operation Avalanche. Here the landings were touch-and-go, and at one point Clark actually considered a withdrawal, though in the end the Allies managed to hang on. Technically, at least, Italy had been “knocked out” of the war, thus fulfilling Churchill’s ambition. Nevertheless, the German Tenth Army remained in Italy, and it dug in along what the Allies called the Gustav Line. The campaign soon bogged down into a lengthy slugfest. Once again the Mediterranean tar baby had absorbed the Allies’ punch and held it fast. Fighting in Italy lasted until the end of the war.
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T
HE
M
EDITERRANEAN
T
AR
B
ABY
, J
ULY
1943–J
ANUARY
1944

IT DID NOT, HOWEVER, DERAIL
the decision made at Trident. While Morgan’s revised instructions called for him to continue with the “deception scheme,” they now emphasized that his principal focus should be on “mounting an operation with target date of May 1, 1944 to secure a lodgment on the Continent from which further operations can be carried out.” There was still no designated operational commander. Churchill told reporters that preparations had not yet reached the point when “the executive commander has to be chosen,” and so Morgan, as COSSAC, continued to plan a major amphibious operation without knowing who would execute it.
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Worse, Morgan found little support from the British military establishment. Institutional reluctance to invest heavily either materially or emotionally in a major cross-Channel operation was in part a legacy of Dunkirk as well as of dark memories of Passchendaele and the Somme. In addition, Britons at almost every level had difficulty absorbing the idea that so vast an operation was even possible. The Americans threw around absurd numbers: Roosevelt mandated the construction of twenty-four million tons of shipping, while Marshall claimed to be raising an army of sixteen million men. The British found it hard to get their heads around such numbers. As Morgan put it, it was almost impossible for British officers “to overcome entirely the effects of a lifetime of niggling, cheeseparing, parsimony, and making do” that had characterized their entire professional experience. And finally, Morgan encountered difficulty navigating the British political bureaucracy, that hodgepodge of offices and committees, some of them a
legacy of pre-Victorian England, that constituted the middle echelon of the British government. (One Royal Navy veteran quipped that British officials moved “at the rate of frozen molasses traveling across sand paper.”) The combination of the ambitious goal, the proximate deadline, tepid cooperation from the military bureaucracy, and skepticism from the top all fed frustration and even anger within the COSSAC group.
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