Admiral Donitz’s submarine force had, however, grown throughout 1942, and in early 1943 the admiral launched a major wolfpack effort against the North Atlantic convoys, and the U-boats sent record numbers of Allied ships to the bottom. But the Germans’ own losses increased; they began losing one submarine for every Allied vessel destroyed. In one two-month period the Allies sank fifty-six U-boats. The Germans reached their peak of frustration in May 1943, when fifty-one U-boats attacked a convoy of forty-two vessels and the pack lost six U-boats in order to sink thirteen merchantmen. Donitz ordered his U-boats to safer waters, and in two months sixty-two convoys crossed the Atlantic without any losses at all. Although the German submarine force continued its war until the collapse of the Third Reich, it did so with appalling losses (753 of 863 patrolling submarines; 28,000 of 41,300 sailors) and diminished danger to the Allied war effort. In the meantime American shipyards, working on twenty-four-hour shifts and profiting by one engineering and managerial innovation after another, continued to send warships and merchantmen down the ways and into the war. Aboard those ships moved American troops and military materiel to places thousands of miles distant that had little in common except that they were now battlegrounds.
Opening a Two-Front War
In the face of depressing news about home-front mobilization failures, of Atlantic sinkings, and of German victories in southern Russia, FDR held fast to one politico-strategic conviction: “It is of the highest importance that the U.S. ground troops be brought into action against the enemy in 1942.” Still unhappy about the diversion of American forces from the buildup in England to expeditions in North Africa, the JCS extemporized two major campaigns to meet the president’s charge, a charge based primarily on FDR’s desire to help Russia and to keep the American public committed to a total war effort. Until early 1944 these two campaigns—one in the Mediterranean and the other in the south Pacific—were the focus of America’s battles with the armed forces of Germany, Italy, and Japan. The campaign in the Mediterranean pleased the British, who feared a premature return to France and who questioned American operational expertise. The broadened commitment to the war against Japan united a set of peculiar bunkmates: General MacArthur and all his domestic admirers, prewar isolationists, the pro-China public, most of the leadership of the U.S. Navy, and even part of the War Department General Staff, which could use the Pacific war to badger the British into a firm commitment to a cross-Channel offensive. The British provided the rationale for the Mediterranean: An Allied offensive there would sever Italy and Vichy France from German domination, divert the Wehrmacht from Russia, and provide air and naval bases for further operations against the heart of the European continent. MacArthur provided the Pacific analogue to Churchill’s “soft underbelly” thesis, arguing that operations mounted from the Hawaii-Australia line would strike Japan’s vulnerable southern defenses and destroy its major bases at Rabaul on New Britain Island and Truk in the Carolines.
Mounting the first offensives required hard bargaining regarding the command and distribution of the available American forces. For the North African operations, the CCS selected General Marshall’s protégé Dwight D. Eisenhower but surrounded him with British subordinates. Aware of the tension between the British and the French, the Allies hoped a distinct American coloration to TORCH (the Moroccan and Algerian invasions) would confuse the Vichy defenders and improve the chance that Allied diplomacy would subvert French resistance. In the Pacific the JCS redrew theater boundaries to give Nimitz control of operations in the Solomon Islands and to limit MacArthur’s direct command to the American and Australian forces aimed at New Guinea. The Navy distrusted the idea of any Army general conducting naval operations using scarce carriers, and MacArthur’s performance in the Philippines had not won him any admirers in blue. The commitment of Army and USAAF units by the end of 1942 showed how dramatically TORCH and CARTWHEEL (the isolation of Rabaul) had redirected the deployment plans of “Germany First.” In rough terms the Army and USAAF sent about 350,000 men to the Pacific and 350,000 to the Mediterranean and England. In terms of combat units the disparity became more striking: The departure of six divisions and eleven air groups for Africa and five divisions and fifteen air groups for the Pacific left only one division and sixteen air groups in England. The diversion of USAAF groups left the air effort against Germany with only one-third of the aircraft planned in early 1942. The naval services put even greater emphasis on the Pacific war. In all warship categories, including destroyers, the Navy deployed the majority of its vessels in the Pacific, building its striking forces in August 1942 around its four surviving large carriers and their cruiser-destroyer screens. Of its ten Pacific battleships, only two were new enough for fast cruising. For the south Pacific war the Marine Corps could provide two divisions and fifteen aviation squadrons.
The Navy–Marine Corps landings at Guadalcanal and nearby islands in August and MacArthur’s Army-Australian advance on Buna, New Guinea, in September opened the south Pacific offensive and set off six months of bitter land-sea-air fighting that ended in a decisive Japanese defeat. Although the jungle war for Guadalcanal tested the fighting heart and skills of two Marine and two Army divisions before the Japanese remnants withdrew, the battle for the Solomons depended ultimately upon air and naval superiority. Admiral Yamamoto and Admiral William F. Halsey attempted to reinforce Guadalcanal and destroy one another’s air units and warships. The U.S. Navy fought its most desperate battles of the war in the Solomons. In seven major fleet engagements and many minor skirmishes, Halsey’s fleet lost twenty-four warships and 5,000 sailors. (In comparison, the ground and air forces had around half as many killed in action.) When the Japanese finally broke off the campaign, only two serviceable American carriers remained. The Japanese suffered even more grievous—and less replaceable—losses: 30,000 soldiers and sailors, 24 warships, more than 100 merchantmen, and 600 aircraft. Among the casualties were many experienced pilots. Moreover, the U.S. Navy demonstrated its willingness to close with the Japanese, even when the flaws in its night-fighting techniques, gunnery, use of radar, and torpedo attack defense tipped the balance toward its more experienced foes. Only in naval air battles—attacks mounted and received—did the Americans show any clear margin of superiority. By the end of the campaign, however, the Americans could meet the Japanese on more than equal terms, whether the combatants were jungle patrols or night-fighting cruisers. The myth of Japanese invincibility died in the Solomons.
MacArthur’s New Guinea offensive established the strategic pattern for Allied victories in the other part of the dual south Pacific advance. With only four American and Australian divisions to commit, MacArthur relied upon USAAF air support and, operating under this air cover, an Allied amphibious fleet composed of beaching ships and craft, cruiser and destroyer escorts, and supply vessels. Tropical diseases, monsoon weather, and jungled mountains conspired with the Japanese to make the Buna campaign a nightmare for the ground troops, but in January 1943 MacArthur’s force held firm control of a lodgment on New Guinea’s northern coast. Although the Buna campaign had been largely an overland epic, MacArthur’s next thrust against the Japanese bases along Huon Bay threw both the 5th Air Force and 7th Fleet into the fray and drew a maximum Japanese air and naval response. The result was a series of disasters for the Japanese as USAAF aircraft, often directed to their targets by ULTRA, destroyed the enemy air cover and reinforcing convoys. By the end of the year MacArthur was prepared to leap the straits to New Britain Island to isolate Rabaul, which he and the JCS no longer thought required actual capture. In the meantime, the American forces in the Solomons had fought up the chain at New Georgia and Bougainville, completing the encirclement. Recognizing the dimension of their defeat in the south Pacific, the Japanese withdrew their fleet and their surviving air units to a new defense line that included the Marianas, the Philippines, Formosa, and Southeast Asia. Deprived of reinforcements, the remaining Japanese garrisons east of this line received orders to delay the Ameri
cans as best they could.
Half a world away from the rainforests of the south Pacific, other Allied forces entered the war for the Mediterranean in November 1942. A year later they had driven the Germans back to the approaches to Rome. As General Bernard L. Montgomery’s 8th Army drove a German-Italian army back from El Alamein to Tunisia, an Anglo-American invasion force struck at three Moroccan locations and the Algerian ports of Oran and Algiers. Arrayed against confused Vichy French defenders and assisted by Free French rebels, the Allies plunged ashore in a combination of commando port assaults and nighttime beach landings. Adding tactical confusion to the political puzzle, the Allies overwhelmed the largely feeble French defenses, then negotiated an end to French resistance with the Vichyite military commander, Admiral Jean Francois Darlan.
Initially mistaken about the Allies’ objectives, Hitler and the Wehrmacht responded quickly by occupying all of France and pouring another army into Tunisia. Eisenhower’s command, plagued by poor transportation and rain, lost the race to Tunisia and soon received its first exposure to German tactical expertise in the Tunisian mountains. The results for the Americans were disheartening. In a series of battles—including a German counterattack at Kasserine Pass—the Americans did not measure up. General Eisenhower judged their leadership as “thin” and their discipline close to that of a “disorderly mob.” American tactics and weapons did not match the Germans’, and American operations showed striking defects in intelligence, reconnaissance, and air support. Only American logistics and artillery proved noteworthy. Smarting from criticism spoken and implied, the amateurish American divisions stuck with the task, prodded by a new corps commander, Lieutenant General George S. Patton Jr. As his deputy, Major General Omar N. Bradley, noted, the American soldier would improve only by “winning battles and killing Germans.”
Despite the frustrations of the Tunisian campaign, the Allied high command (including Roosevelt and Churchill) assembled in Casablanca in January 1943 to examine their strategy for the coming year. The decisions and indecision had a marked Churchillian cast. The war upon Germany would continue to depend primarily upon strategic bombing, the war against the U-boats, subversion on the Continent, and active operations in the Mediterranean. The British argued that Italy could be driven from the war with the resources already committed to the Mediterranean theater, and the CCS approved planning for an invasion of Sicily. Additional meetings in Washington and Quebec extended and expanded the Mediterranean campaign to include a September invasion of Italy. Buoyed by the final success of the Tunisian campaign, which ended in May 1943 with the surrender of 240,000 Germans and Italians, the Allies had clearly deferred a cross-Channel attack until 1944. The Russians and some American planners wondered if there would be any attack at all.
The reasons in 1943 for expanding the Mediterranean campaign were many and persuasive. In strategic terms a campaign into Italy might divert German divisions from the Eastern Front and provide air bases for Allied bomber strikes against Germany and targets in Eastern Europe. Italy’s collapse would wound the German cause politically and weaken it militarily. In logistical terms the Allies had made an irreversible commitment to the theater, building ports and airfields, establishing supply dumps and bases, and deploying an army of rear-echelon administrative and technical personnel that outnumbered the fighting troops. The Tunisian campaign had also established the fact that Anglo-American command relationships needed refinement. Another major concern was the shocking lack of air-ground cooperation.
The Sicilian campaign (July–August 1943) revealed both improvements and deficiencies in the Allies’ ability to beat the Axis armed forces in battle. Enjoying tactical surprise because the Germans again misjudged the invasion objective, the American 7th Army (Patton) and the British 8th Army (Montgomery) established beachheads ashore, but German-Italian armored counterattacks on the American beaches came within a few kilometers of success. Only the suicidal bravery of American infantry (particularly the troopers of the 82d Airborne Division) and the timely massing of naval and artillery shellfire drove the Germans off. Luftwaffe attacks on the invasion shipping and beaches hindered operations and led Allied antiaircraft gunners to shoot down more friendly troop transports than they did German aircraft. The campaign developed as two operations, primarily because Patton and Montgomery so chose, and Eisenhower and General Harold R.L.G. Alexander, overall ground commander, did not impose their will upon the ambitious army commanders. The result was Patton’s sweeping ground-amphibious envelopment of Messina through Palermo and Montgomery’s plodding advance up Sicily’s eastern coast toward the same objective. The Axis defense forces—built around only two German divisions—fought a skilled delaying action, then evacuated the island across the straits of Messina. Despite the Allied victory, the Sicilian campaign—marked by Anglo-American acrimony—did not bode well for combined operations.
Like the North African invasion, the Allied assault upon Italy began in a miasma of political intrigue. Mussolini’s political and military failures had alienated King Victor Emmanuel and the Italian military high command, who conspired to remove Il Duce in July. The change actually worked to the Allies’ disadvantage, for it removed the pretext for Italian-German cooperation. The Wehrmacht moved swiftly to send troops deep into Italy’s “boot” and to intimidate the Italian armed forces, which either disintegrated or went into captivity. The Italians wanted out of the war, but they didn’t want to fight Germans. This decision meant that an easy landing, especially at Rome or farther north, passed into the realm of might-have-beens. When Italy formally surrendered on September 8, the military results were negligible. The Allies would have to fight up the entire peninsula, a very hard underbelly in topographical and tactical terms. As one Allied general noted, “Wars should be fought in a better country than this.”
The Italian campaign developed in ways that suggested that the Germans were diverting the Allies from other theaters rather than vice versa. Although the British 8th Army—an international force of British Commonwealth, Polish, and French units—managed to land against light resistance and fight up Italy’s eastern coast, the Anglo-American 5th Army (Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark) had to fight a stiff battle at Salerno before it freed the port city of Naples on the western coast. Two months of hard campaigning brought the Allied armies only as far as the Germans’ Gustav Line, a belt of mountain defenses a hundred miles south of Rome anchored in front of the Americans along the Rapido River and the heights above Cassino. Terrain and weather favored the German defenders, who again proved highly professional and definitely undefeated. In a war of rocks and rubble, air superiority and massed artillery could not spare Allied infantry the task of rooting out the Germans position by position. At the end of 1943 the Italian campaign had stalled, with eleven German front-line divisions confounding the best efforts of fourteen Allied divisions.
Assessing the actual course of the war at the end of 1943, FDR, Churchill, and their military planners had to face several strategic situations that carried elements of both promise and disappointment. The offensive war with Japan had developed with greater success than might have been expected, despite limited operations in the Pacific. The Mediterranean campaign had indeed accomplished its more limited objectives (eliminating Vichy France and Italy as Axis assets), but it had not brought excessive pressure upon the bulk of the Wehrmacht. The most impressive military victories, in fact, belonged to the Russians, who had turned the tide at Stalingrad and had begun offensive operations against the Germans. Although the Allied bombardment of Germany had forced the Luftwaffe to redeploy air units from the Russian front, it had not become a true “second front,” at least in Russian eyes. The American mobilization, however, was reaching its productive peak, and the victory in the Battle of the Atlantic meant that American divisions and air groups could now reach England in accelerating numbers. In sum, the war was not yet won, but it would not be lost if the Allied coalition remained intact and applied its military might toward the goal of Germa
n and Japanese unconditional surrender.
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FOURTEEN
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The United States and World War II: The Road to Victory, 1943–1945
For the embattled Allies the winter of 1943–1944 was the best of times and the worst of times. The prospect of ultimate victory had never been brighter, yet that prospect depended on operations not yet mounted, on campaigns not yet successful. Moreover, the strategic opportunism of 1942–1943 had not produced decisive victories comparable with the Allied effort. Only the campaign in the south Pacific had brought a major shift in enemy strategy dictated by the power of Anglo-American arms. The war’s greatest change, in fact, had come in Russia, where the Soviet armored hosts had bludgeoned the Wehrmacht onto the strategic defensive. Josef Stalin complained that the two “second fronts” that the Allies had thus far created—the Mediterranean campaign and the strategic bombardment of Germany—had not produced wounds mortal for the Third Reich.
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