Vinson rewarded King’s fealty with a letter withdrawing his support for the new proposal. In no uncertain terms, the powerful chairman told Knox that he wanted King running the whole show at Main Navy.29
Knox was furious. He knew where Vinson’s letter had been drafted, and it wasn’t in the Cannon House Office Building. The secretary sputtered to Roosevelt, “[Vinson’s letter] bears internal evidence of having been prepared, I think, in the Navy Department. . . . You will not fail to observe . . . that there is the same effort to consolidate all authority in one person, and that not the Secretary of the Navy.”30
King didn’t care what the Secretary of the Navy thought. He saw military politics in terms of power and weakness, not fair and equitable. The Secretary of the Navy could bitch all he wanted, but with Chairman Vinson in King’s corner, there wasn’t a damned thing Knox could do about it. The twin titles of COMINCH and CNO would hang on Ernie King’s door a while longer.
He would need every bit of his authority to deal with a storm brewing over the upcoming invasion in Europe.
FORTY
“CONSIDERABLE SOB STUFF”
OPERATION NEPTUNE, OVERLORD’S LANDING PHASE, ORIGINALLY CALLED for a three-division assault on Normandy’s beaches. It had been planned by the capable Sir Frederick Morgan, and his three-division operation had been limited by the estimated number of landing craft available in the spring of 1944. Three divisions seemed a reasonable assumption going into the Tehran conference.
After Roosevelt appointed Eisenhower to command OVERLORD, Marshall ordered Ike to return home for a few days to rest, see Mamie, and forget about the war. “You will be under terrific strain from now on,” he told Eisenhower. “I am interested that you are fully prepared to bear the strain and I am not interested in the usual rejoinder that you can take it. It is of vast importance that you be fresh mentally and you certainly will not be if you go straight from one great problem to another. Now come on home and see your wife and trust somebody else for 20 minutes in England.”
Upon Eisenhower’s arrival in London, that rested mind focused on OVERLORD’s three-division pillar and found it unstable. At the same time General Montgomery, OVERLORD’s ground commander, decreed that three divisions would be inadequate to capture the beaches and build a sufficient bridgehead to widen the invasion.
Before January’s end, Ike and Monty had rewritten the playbook. NEPTUNE would include five reinforced assault divisions, parachute and glider troops, armor, reinforcements, and support troops. Its projected load was 174,320 men and 20,018 vehicles, and except for a small number of airborne troops, every mother’s son would be carried across the English Channel on a ship.1
As dramatic as the D-day landings would be, NEPTUNE was merely the tip of OVERLORD’s much larger blade. The real struggle would begin once Rommel and his boss, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, figured out that Normandy was no feint and launched their panzer counterattacks. With those attacks, the battle for France would be joined.
Eisenhower’s planners at Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, or “SHAEF,” believed they could pull off the invasion if Rommel and von Rundstedt could not throw more than thirteen mobile divisions at them within three days of the landings—but only if the Allies shoved troops, ammunition, and fuel across the Channel faster than the Nazis could move them from central France. Fighting men would decide the fate of NEPTUNE, but OVERLORD’s fate rested in the calloused hands of engineers driving bulldozers, sailors piloting landing ships, and beachmasters moving ammunition and fuel from sea to shore.
The weapons of this battle would be combat loaders—ships carrying complete units of infantry, tanks, and artillery over open water—and the amphibious craft that would cross the home stretch and disgorge men, vehicles, and supplies onto French soil. These obscure vessels spawned an alphabet soup that New Deal bureaucrats would envy. Vessels bearing acronyms like LST (Landing Ship, Tank), APA (assault troop transports), LCVP (Landing Craft, Vehicle/Personnel, the “Higgins boat”), LCM (Landing Craft, Medium), DUKW (two-and-a-half-ton amphibious truck), and LVT (amphibious tractor, or “Amtrack”) confounded planners with their nomenclature and scarcity. At one point, Eisenhower groaned to an aide that when he died, “his coffin should be in the shape of a landing craft, as they are practically killing him with worry.”2
When Eisenhower told the Combined Chiefs that OVERLORD needed more assault divisions, he presented the bill in terms of those coffin prototypes. In addition to the fleet already amassed for the invasion, the chiefs would have to find him seven large infantry landing ships, forty-seven LSTs, seventy-two infantry landing craft, 144 tank landing craft, and a headquarters ship, for a total of 271 new vessels. To escort the 271 new vessels, he would also need an additional two dozen destroyers, twenty-eight motor launches, four flotillas of minesweepers, and a bombardment force of five cruisers, a dozen standard destroyers, and one or two battleships.3
• • •
As his dark eyes tore through a bewildering tide of production tables, Admiral King began to realize just how many of those 271 new vessels he didn’t have. In February, he had assured journalists that “the craft in the Channel will be so numerous that one could walk dry-shod to the beach.” But there would be a lot of wet-shod soldiers if Eisenhower added two divisions and King couldn’t find the ships to ferry them.4
Before Pearl Harbor, no one had grasped the immense scale of shipping required to land soldiers on a hostile beach, much less execute near simultaneous landings on beaches in the Marianas, Italy, southern France, and Normandy. A crash program of landing craft construction in early 1942 had put a deep dent in production of destroyers and escort carriers desperately needed in the Atlantic. Stung by appalling losses to U-boats, the Navy was reluctant to resume priority for assault craft production until OVERLORD seemed certain. But by early 1944, it was too late; there was not enough “lift” to go around.5
• • •
Something had to give, and the question was who would be giving. To strengthen NEPTUNE and keep the momentum in Italy, Montgomery, Churchill, and the British chiefs were prepared to cut ANVIL to a one-division feint. Marshall and King, believing ANVIL vital to OVERLORD’s success, were prepared to curtail operations in Italy, but they refused to cut either NEPTUNE or ANVIL.6
In Italy, Churchill insisted on launching Operation SHINGLE, a corps-size landing at Anzio about thirty-five miles from the Italian capital. But to reassure the Americans, he suggested that if SHINGLE were launched around January 20, the LSTs used for SHINGLE could be sent back to England in plenty of time for OVERLORD. Roosevelt agreed, but he insisted that the ships must go to England as soon as they could be released from Italy, without further delay.7
Launched on the twenty-second of January, SHINGLE bogged down under German counterattacks, and the Anglo-American force dug in for a long and violent struggle around Anzio. Churchill told the British chiefs a week later, “I had hoped we were hurling a wildcat into the shore that would tear the bowels out of the Boche. Instead we have a stranded vast whale with its tail flopping about in the water.”
To add fuel to the Anzio attack, Churchill and his chiefs wanted those LSTs to tarry in Italy a while longer. The conflicting demands of OVERLORD, ANVIL, and SHINGLE tossed the Allies onto the horns of a dilemma: Which front would be robbed to ensure that Eisenhower had enough ships to smash into Hitler’s Festung Europa?8
To the British, the answer was spelled “ANVIL.” A landing in southern France, five hundred miles from Normandy’s beaches, would do nothing to help Eisenhower’s men. The Riviera had about as much to do with OVERLORD as Italy did, so why shut down a big Italian show to open a smaller French one? Better, they felt, to keep pushing in Italy and give Eisenhower ANVIL’s ships. At most, ANVIL should be reduced to a one-division feint.
The Joint Chiefs had no authority, or inclination, to rob ANVIL to beef up Italy. During OVERLORD’s follow-up phases, the Al
lies would use Marseilles, one of ANVIL’s target ports, to pour in massive reinforcements from the south and augment Allied supply lines, an advantage that appealed to the logistician in Marshall. Roosevelt had also promised Uncle Joe that the Allies would land in southern France, and it was a promise he intended to keep. Strategically, they saw the Italian campaign ending at a frozen, easily defended wall known as the Italian Alps, where German soldiers, holding the high ground, would fight among the snowdrifts and edelweiss until someone told them the war was over. As correspondent Hanson Baldwin put it, “All roads led to Rome, but Rome led nowhere.”9
In London, Eisenhower tried to broker a compromise among the Combined Chiefs by enlarging his “lift” pie. He played dangerous number games by overloading ships, swapping LSTs for less capable vessels, and decreeing, like King Canute, an increase in the percentage of craft that SHAEF would deem “serviceable,” or ready for duty, at any given time. He also pushed back the invasion from early May to early June, to allow another month’s landing craft production to arrive in England.
But creative accounting and aggressive management would get Eisenhower only so far. On February 19, he told Marshall that, in light of the lift shortage, the needs of the Italian theater probably required the chiefs to cancel ANVIL.10
In a White House meeting two days later, the Joint Chiefs informed Roosevelt the British were trying to cut ANVIL to a pittance that wouldn’t make it worth the effort. FDR wouldn’t hear of it. At Tehran, he said, the Russians had been “tickled to death” over ANVIL. If ANVIL were canceled, they “would not be happy, even if we told them it would mean two or more divisions for OVERLORD.”11
Yet the British would not budge. ANVIL would require ten or twelve divisions to follow up the initial landing, and with a major battle raging south of Rome, they wanted those divisions in Italy, not ambling through the Cotê d’Azure.
Because Marshall and King had no authority to compromise on ANVIL, they felt the best solution was to shelve the decision until late March and see where things stood. The Combined Chiefs agreed. They would defer their argument and take a second look at ANVIL on March 20.12
•
As logistical problems ensnared the Allied high command, George Marshall thanked his stars for his friend Field Marshal Sir John Dill, the senior British military representative in Washington. Handsome, tactful, and only a year younger than Marshall, Sir John had been Marshall’s British counterpart when they first met at Placentia Bay in 1941. Since the ARCADIA conference the following December, he and Marshall had developed a personal bond unique among the members of the Allied high command.
Dill had the unusual ability to see the picture from both sides of the Atlantic, and the American chiefs trusted him. When Churchill complained about British exclusion from the Manhattan Project, the Americans offered to put Dill on the project’s top policy committee, and when bitter disputes erupted over the Mediterranean and France, Dill minimized collateral damage to the “very special relationship.”13
Sir John was also Marshall’s back channel to the FDR-Churchill conversations. Unlike the secretive Roosevelt, Churchill ensured that copies of important communications between him and the American president were regularly circulated among his military staff. Dill would bring his copies to Marshall’s office so Marshall would know what his commander-in-chief was telling his military allies.
Churchill had never liked Dill, and in disclosing the top secret correspondence to Marshall, Dill was taking an enormous professional risk. “Dill would be destroyed in a minute if this was discovered,” Marshall reflected. Yet Dill assumed that risk to keep the vital engine of cooperation running just a little smoother.14
Dill’s destruction looked probable in mid-February 1944, when Marshall heard rumors that Churchill was planning to recall him to London. Genuinely worried about the repercussions for the alliance, Marshall and Stimson cooked up a scheme to give Dill enough stateside clout to discourage Churchill from firing him. At Stimson’s suggestion, Marshall went to see Harvey Bundy, special assistant on the Manhattan Project, with a novel idea.
“Bundy, I need help,” said Marshall. “I have word that Churchill is likely to throw out Sir John Dill and my relations with Dill are vital. . . . I wish you would go up to Cambridge, to Harvard, and see if they can’t give him a quick honorary degree.”15
Bundy, a Yale man, promised to do what he could. He rang up the university administration, but reported back that Harvard could confer a degree only during a convocation, and a convocation was not be arranged on the spur of the moment.
“Try Yale,” Marshall said.
Bundy tried his alma mater, and this time it worked. Yale president Charles Seymour not only promised to give Sir John an honorary degree, but he would award him the prestigious Charles P. Howland Prize for international relations and roll out the reddest of carpets (which, in New Haven, were blue). The ceremony would be adorned with academic robes, a mace bearer, and most importantly, extensive publicity.
To ensure the story received the kind of press coverage that would register in London, Stimson, Marshall, McCloy, and Bundy attended the ceremony. They sat in rapt attention as Sir John received his doctorate, and Marshall encouraged cameramen and movie crews to take their fill of pictures with Dill surrounded by War Department luminaries.
Other colleges followed Yale’s lead. William and Mary, Columbia, and their sister universities began rolling out awards for the field marshal, and each ceremony was attended by news coverage monitored at Downing Street.
It wasn’t long before a relieved Marshall heard that Churchill had remarked, “Dill must be doing quite a job over there,” and Dill remained at his post.16
• • •
Dill’s diplomacy was a big glob of the grease that kept the motor running smoothly—or as smoothly as it could run on a pockmarked, bumpy road. But diplomacy could change neither basic arithmetic nor Churchill’s strategy, and the question of how to serve up three halves of a single pie dogged Marshall, King, and the rest of the Allied chiefs in the spring of 1944.
On March 20, Eisenhower told an unhappy Marshall that ANVIL had become the war’s latest casualty. While Eisenhower supported the ANVIL concept, to give ANVIL the lift it needed, he would have to short OVERLORD by fifteen LSTs. That left too thin a margin to give OVERLORD a favorable chance. He asked the Combined Chiefs to cancel the ANVIL landings and give him an additional twenty-six LSTs, plus an assortment of other landing ships and minesweepers.17
Marshall was deeply disappointed, but he took Eisenhower at his word, for Eisenhower was not the type to demand more than he needed. Looking for a middle ground, Marshall suggested rescheduling ANVIL for July 10, and he told Eisenhower landing craft coming off the shipyards could be diverted from the Pacific and would be available for use in southern France if the British agreed to launch ANVIL by mid-July. If they would not, he said, the landing craft would go to the Pacific as scheduled.18
They would not. As Churchill saw it, the rewards of a drive through Italy into the Po River valley, toward Istria or north to Austria, would be lost if divisions and ships were committed to ANVIL. The British refused to launch ANVIL in June, July, or any other time, and they wanted the Pacific landing craft sent to Italy.19
Dill—Doctor Dill now—explained the problem to his countrymen from the American point of view. The U.S. chiefs were fighting a war in the Pacific, where places like Kwajalein and Tarawa commanded the U.S. public’s attention. They courted a heavy political risk by diverting landing ships slated for MacArthur and Nimitz to Europe.
“It is difficult to realize how hardly anything can be taken from the Pacific in view of the fact that the U.S. Chiefs of staff are constantly being abused for neglecting [the Pacific] theater,” Dill wrote the British chiefs on April 1. “The U.S. Chiefs of staff made the offer [of additional landing craft for ANVIL] with a feeling of broadminded generosity and were shocked and pained
to find how little we appreciated their magnanimity and how gaily we proposed to accept their legacy while disregarding the terms of the will.”20
Churchill pressed Marshall to back down. “Dill tells me that you had expected me to support ‘Anvil’ more rigorously in view of my enthusiasm for it when it was first proposed by you at Teheran,” he wrote Marshall on April 16. “Please do me the justice to remember that the situation is vastly changed.”21
But Marshall would not retreat. The stalemate continued, and as before, a decision would have to await further developments on Italy’s blood-soaked soil. ANVIL was still alive, for the moment, but Marshall could see its pulse was faint, its breath shallow. And Churchill was waiting by its bedside with a pillow.22
•
ANVIL was not the only plan in acute distress. One of OVERLORD’s many subsidiary operations was the Transportation Plan, a massive bombing campaign to wipe out railyards near Paris, bridges over the Seine River, and road networks linking Normandy’s beaches with the rest of France.23
SHAEF estimated that Hitler had fifty-one divisions in France and the Low Countries. His best troops were concentrated around Calais, north of Normandy, and in the French interior. To keep Allied troops from being overwhelmed in OVERLORD’s critical first days, SHAEF had to keep those Germans away from the Normandy coast. That required Allied bomber command to wreck the French transportation network.24
A mass bombing of French rail and road centers would take many Frenchmen with it—possibly eighty thousand casualties, Churchill estimated, including ten thousand or more killed. Having endured the horrors of the German blitz over London, Churchill was repelled by the thought of dismembered French bodies strewn about Paris. He had been forced to fire on the French Navy in 1940, and he did not want to kill more Frenchmen in 1944. He saw in Eisenhower’s plan an act not only morally objectionable, but one that would poison Anglo-French relations for years to come.25
American Warlords Page 41
