Second Front: The Allied Invasion of France, 1942–43 (An Alternative History)

by Alexander M. Grace

  “The alternative,” King said, “is to hand them an ultimatum. In the words of Abraham Lincoln, if they’re not going to use our army, they should let us borrow it for awhile. We’ll shift over to the Pacific where we don’t have to ask permission to fight the war.”

  “Well, let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that. I’m not about to drive this alliance onto the reefs in favor of a tactical advantage.” Several of the officers started to speak, but Roosevelt held up his hands. “You’ve convinced me, in principle, that this is an idea worth pursuing, but it is just a difference in tactics, we’ve got to look at the big picture.”

  “Which brings us to the issue of why we need to take the lead here,” Marshall said. “We need to recognize that the vision of this administration, the American vision, of the postwar world, is not the same as that of either the British or of any imaginable French government. They want the status quo ante bellum, big empires run from Europe. That’s what they want to make the world safe for. The British agreed with forcing de Gaulle to accept an end to the French mandate in Syria and Lebanon and the formation of independent governments, not because they give a hoot about self-determination, but because they’d just as soon see France weaker. If we ever want to see India, Africa, and Southeast Asia free, we’re going to have to stop playing second fiddle to the British.”

  “That sounds good to me,” Roosevelt agreed, “but doesn’t it follow that the sooner we force a decision on the continent, the more of a role the British are going to be playing. It’s going to be some time before we even begin to match their numbers of trained and equipped manpower.”

  “That’s just why it might be just as well that the British don’t get completely on board with this French plan. In six months, yes, they’ll still have more men in the field, but within a year that won’t be the case anymore. In the meanwhile, the British will be busy mopping up in North Africa, which we can leave to them, and then we’ll have the French thrown into the mix in a big way.”

  “And we can play one off against the other.”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

  Roosevelt sighed and looked out the tall windows across the lawns of the White House toward the ellipse and the Potomac beyond. “Let’s give it a try.”

  The various military men rose to leave, but Roosevelt touched Marshall’s sleeve with his hand and said softly, “I’d like to have a quick word with you.” Marshall nodded and sat back down as the others filed from the room, a couple of them, Admiral King and Secretary Hull in particular, casting frowning glances over their shoulders as they left.

  Roosevelt cleared his throat. “I can see that there are two key assignments involved in your proposal, even before we get into the command of armies and corps and what-not. Someone is going to have to plan this, do the real nuts and bolts work to make it a reality, and someone is going to have to talk to the French. Do you have anyone in mind for those jobs?”

  “Naturally, I expect to be up to my ears in the planning, but I had Eisenhower in mind for putting it all together. His staff work at III Corps during the Louisiana maneuvers was little short of brilliant, and he’s already done a lot of the preliminary studies.”

  Roosevelt pursed his lips and nodded. “And for the diplomatic mission? Should it be a career diplomat or a soldier?”

  “While you’re right that it is diplomacy, the man will be dealing with military men on the other side and ninety percent of the topic under discussion will be military. A diplomat might have the personal skills, but he couldn’t have the expertise in hardware and strategy that this calls for. I talked with Eisenhower about this, and he recommended General Mark Clark. He’s been our liaison to the Free French for some time, so he’s familiar with the players.”

  “I’m not sure that close ties to the Free French would necessarily stand us in good stead on this one.”

  “My thoughts exactly, Mr. President,” Marshall agreed. “The man I have in mind is Patton.”

  Roosevelt raised his eyebrows. “From what I’ve seen and heard of General Patton, he may be a fine field commander, the kind men will follow, but I find it hard to picture him as a diplomat.”

  “That’s true, sir, but he served in France in the last war, and fought alongside the French. That’s something they’ll respect. Also, he speaks excellent French, which Clark doesn’t, and I think anyone who tries to do this braying the King’s English and working through an interpreter is going in with two strikes against him. And he knows armor tactics. He’ll be able to answer the questions the French will certainly have about what our army can do against the Germans. And, in a sense, his somewhat abrasive personality may work for us. He won’t knuckle under to anyone, and he won’t mince words either. If he comes back with an agreement at all, I think that it will be one that will stick.”

  “Then do it, General.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The subsequent conference between Churchill and the Imperial General Staff on one side and Roosevelt with his Joint Chiefs on the other was one of the stormiest of the war. At one point, Admiral King had to be physically restrained from climbing across the table to get at a British general who had made some disparaging comment about American “amateurs,” although it was noted that it was late in the evening, and Admiral King had made several visits to the sideboard arrayed with rows of liquor bottles.

  As expected, the British had rejected out of hand the idea of an attempt to bring the French back into the war as active allies, but, in the face of American insistence and the frequently repeated threat to divert more resources to the Pacific Theater, they had reluctantly agreed to staff studies of the problem and discreet efforts by the Americans to establish some sort of dialogue with the Vichy regime. It was unanimously agreed, however, that General de Gaulle and the Free French should be kept completely in the dark about the proposal. In the final analysis, Churchill went away well satisfied with a promise from Roosevelt that North Africa would be the target for an invasion before the end of the year, and he was further pleased with Marshall’s offer to strip over one hundred new Sherman tanks from the American 1st Armored Division, which had just received them, and to ship these immediately to the British Eighth Army in Egypt to help gear up for Montgomery’s expected offensive against Rommel. Churchill was thoroughly convinced when Roosevelt, in a private chat late one evening, commented that he desperately wanted to have American troops in combat against the Germans before the 3 November 1942 elections, adding that the only chance of meeting that deadline would be to send a division or two to support Montgomery or to send them to French North Africa.

  SUMMER 1942

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  This tentative approval was all that Marshall and his cohorts needed, for the moment. The wheels of the second front were set in motion.

  Eisenhower was not particularly pleased with his assignment. Most other brigadier generals of his class, or even younger, were being given field commands and were supervising the training of the units they would be taking into battle. Instead of that, Eisenhower was cloistered in a windowless suite of offices in the basement of the Pentagon with a small nucleus of junior officers, surrounded by stacks of reference works on logistics, cargo ship capacity and loading doctrine, hydrographic maps of the Mediterranean Basin, training logs of new combat units, and reams of intelligence reports about the Axis forces in Western Europe. For days, and then weeks, Eisenhower poured over tables and charts, interrupted only by daily briefings he would give to the Joint Chiefs and sometimes heated meetings with his counterparts from the Navy and the Air Corps.

  Eisenhower was surprised that he encountered more obstacles in the form of service doctrines than he did in the physical limitations of the resources available for the operation. For example, he learned early on that shipping capacity was not nearly as limited as he had assumed, and that there was more than adequate tonnage available to transport the forces required for the initial invasion and subsequent resupply and build-up phase. The limitation
was in the size of the convoys that the Navy felt it could adequately protect on the trip from the United States to the Mediterranean. The U.S. Navy had decided that a maximum of 45 slow merchantmen could be escorted in a single convoy (compared to 55 for the British) and only 25 in a fast convoy. Since port capacity in southern France and North Africa would not be a problem, Eisenhower had to convince the Navy of the utmost importance of making a maximum effort at getting the largest quantity of men and materiel across the ocean in the first lift. Assuming that the French were going to let the Allies in without a fight, the key thing was to get as much landed as possible before the Germans could react and either recapture some of the ports or close them through bombing. It ultimately took direct intervention by Marshall, Stimson, and the President to force the Navy to agree to the larger, British-style convoys as well as to allow fast tankers to make the crossing alone and unescorted.

  He ran into similar obstructionism from the Air Corps, but on purely philosophical grounds. Between the wars, a number of influential writers had prophesied that future wars could be won from the air without the involvement of the poor, bloody infantry. The theory was that, by identifying key choke points in an enemy’s industrial system, such as petroleum refining or the manufacture of vital components of modern machinery, like ball bearings, and destroying these targets from the air, the enemy war machine would simply grind to a creaking halt. Meanwhile, the taste of the enemy populace for war would be diminished by the terror bombing of major cities. The Brit ish had begun this “experiment” over the preceding months, and the American flyers were eager to test their own theories of the efficacy of daylight bombing.

  The role of the air force in the new operation, now code-named HAYMAKER, was considerably different. For a large proportion of the aircraft involved, their role would be limited to tactical, not strategic bombing. They would be hitting not the enemy’s industrial base, but railroad junctions, bridges, marshalling yards, road networks, and troop concentrations. In a perverted form of logic, the airmen did not want this ground offensive to succeed for the simple reason that it would deny them the chance of proving that they could have done the same thing more easily and cheaply from the air. They argued that, just as warfare had been revolutionized when the armored formations had finally broken the hidebound traditions that tied them to supporting the infantry, it would be revolutionized again if only the fliers could be allowed to break free of their bonds to the ground forces and fight their own kind of war.

  Eisenhower, and Marshall acting as arbiter, had listened to impassioned pleas from Hap Arnold and one of his leading bomber commanders, General Curtis LeMay. They listened patiently and commiserated with them about the lack of understanding among civilian politicians for the true art form that was military science, and ultimately they compromised. While there would be a brief period, probably no more than a week or two, in which all air resources would be concentrated on helping to establish the lodgment in southern France, the 8th Air Force in England would then resume strategic bombardment of Germany proper, while the newly formed 12th Air Force would have its headquarters in France itself and would carry the burden of the tactical operations in support of the invasion. Most of the heavy B-17 bombers and long-range fighters like the new P-51s, would remain with 8th Air Force, while light bombers and the older P-40s would move over to the 12th for its largely defensive and close support duties. Marshall also assured Arnold and LeMay that there would be ample opportunity to demonstrate their theories of strategic air warfare in the Pacific, since no one in his right mind looked forward to mounting an invasion of the Japanese home islands.

  The most serious resistance to the project, however, came from the British. The ultimate argument of both Churchill and the Imperial General Staff, represented in Washington by General Sir John Dill, was that it was not far from suicidal to place green American troops at the mercy of the scarred veterans of the Wehrmacht. The French, they said, were mere shadows of their former selves, even assuming that they could be persuaded to take up their arms again, and would crumble at the first shot. That would leave the Americans to take their first lesson in combat direct from the masters, and it would be a hard lesson indeed, as the British, Russians, French, and virtually every other nation in Europe could testify from bitter experience.

  Eisenhower typically countered with an open invitation for the British to take a larger role in the (still very hypothetical) invasion with their more seasoned forces. The British would then come back with the point that, even if the British sector held, the Germans would naturally concentrate precisely on the Americans, and collapse the line from their end. Neither side was willing to give in, and planning went forward with a major rift in the alliance. The British would only commit a single division, to be landed in North Africa, airborne troops, and some air and naval support, regardless of whether the Americans chose to insist on hitting the continent or not. It was a massive game of chicken, with each side attempting to call the other’s bluff. The British, however, were concerned that, although the Americans did seem to be working on a complete plan for the seizure of just French North Africa, they seemed to be devoting much too much effort to staffing out the broader Vichy France scenario, which the British had understood to be a remote contingency plan, more of a staff exercise than a realistic possibility.

  During the summer, Churchill made a declaration to the effect that it would be ridiculous to undertake a military operation of the scope of an amphibious invasion of Europe without conducting a “reconnaissance in force.” Many American, and even some British military leaders were appalled at his suggestion of putting a full division on the beach in northern France with a view to determining the feasibility of capturing a port in the face of the expected German resistance. His opponents argued that, in terms of reconnaissance, there was nothing the twelve thousand men of a division would be able to see that a squad of commandos or a flight of reconnaissance aircraft could not do with infinitely less risk and cost. They also insisted that the capture of a small port by a division would not necessarily mean that a force of several divisions could then capture a large port, or that failure by the former would imply failure by the latter. What was certain was that dozens or hundreds of precious landing craft would inevitably be lost; casualties would likely be high, and it would be virtually impossible to withdraw much of the raiding force once they had gotten ashore.

  Churchill was insistent, however, and most of his commanders supported his views. Lord Mountbatten thought that the raid would provide excellent training for the actual invasion of Europe, whenever it might be launched. Since it was to be essentially a British, or more exactly, a Commonwealth operation, the Americans had little cause to argue, although a small force of U.S. Rangers would be included in the landing force as a token contribution. The bulk of the force would be made up of the 2nd Canadian Division, reinforced by the Rangers and two groups of British commandos and a battalion of the Calgary Tanks.

  Early on the morning of 19 August 1942, the Canadians charged ashore across the esplanade at the small seaside resort of Dieppe, just east of the mouth of the River Seine. With insufficient naval gunfire and close air support, and in the face of well-organized defenses manned by the veteran 302nd Infantry Division, the outcome was not surprising. Over one thousand Canadians died in the surf or on the exposed beaches, and not a single tank made it past the high water mark. When the disastrous attack was finally called off, with some of the survivors hauled away by the few still-functioning landing craft, another two thousand Canadians were left as prisoners in the hands of the Germans.

  Some British military leaders attempted to use the failure at Dieppe as evidence of the folly of attempting an invasion anywhere on the continent at this time, but the argument rang rather hollow. There were bitter comments in the halls of the Pentagon that Churchill had sacrificed the Canadians on purpose in a poorly designed operation that was bound to fail precisely to make his point, and these sentiments were echoed in Ottawa wit
h the added comment that it was interesting that British troops had not been chosen for the honor. If such had been Churchill’s thinking, and no credible evidence has ever surfaced to this effect, he badly miscalculated. Marshall used the Dieppe fiasco in his discussions with Roosevelt to emphasize the risk involved in attempting an amphibious landing against organized German resistance. If the Allies were not simply to resign themselves to sending bombers and dirty looks across the Channel, the only way to come to grips with the Nazis, Marshall insisted, was to gain a viable foothold in the only area where the Germans did not man the defenses. The only place that fit this bill was the Mediterranean coast of France.

  By late September, Eisenhower’s staff had fairly firm figures for the forces that would be at their disposal between then and the end of the year. A tentative kick-off date of 1 November was set, with a view toward meeting Roosevelt’s purely political concern of having American troops in the battle by Election Day. It appeared that the initial expeditionary force would consist of the American 1st and 2nd Armored Divisions, the 1st, 3rd, 9th, 34th, and 36th Infantry Divisions, and a wide assortment of supporting units, including anti-tank, artillery, anti-aircraft, and engineer units. There would also be the 5th Canadian Armored and the 1st Canadian Infantry Divisions and elements of the 2nd Infantry. The American 82nd Airborne and the British 1st Airborne would be dropped well inland to help the French establish a defensive perimeter behind which the heavy ground units could organize. The British 78th Infantry Division would land at Bizerte in Tunisia, and smaller American and British units would occupy other North African ports. Naval forces would include three British and three American battleships, two British and one American carriers, plus four more small American escort carriers, and a host of cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and corvettes, covering for several dozen troop transports and merchantmen and swarms of landing craft of all sizes. There would also be several hundred naval aircraft flying cover missions, and the bulk of the British and American air forces in England would be diverted either to supporting the landings directly or indirectly while over a thousand aircraft would transfer to bases in southern France and North Africa for future operations.