The real challenge, everyone knew, would be in getting that sort of agreement out of the British. It had become apparent in the preceding months that Churchill had gone along with the planning sessions primarily on the assumption that the stiff-necked French would never submit to any sort of feasible plan, and he now made a number of suggested modifications which were clearly designed to sabotage it. He insisted that Tunisia, being adjacent to the area where active operations were still being conducted against the Germans, should be placed under a United Nations mandate, but Roosevelt rejected this out of hand.
The British also became suddenly very protective of the rights of General de Gaulle, after having spared no pains to handicap his efforts to organize the Free French movement and having courted the Vichy regime openly over the previous two years. French troops on British soil when France surrendered were virtually coerced into returning to their homeland instead of joining de Gaulle, and those captured when the Allies seized Syria and Lebanon had been scrupulously returned to France without de Gaulle’s agents having any opportunity to try to recruit them. Churchill now demanded that de Gaulle be given command of the French Armed Forces, probably in the hope that the Vichy regime would kill the entire project in protest, but Roosevelt killed this tactic by the simple expedient of pointing out that the French just might accept, and no one wanted to face a France with de Gaulle in a position of authority. Thus, with British involvement kept to a minimum and with dire warnings from the Imperial General Staff about impending disaster ringing in their ears, the planners were allowed to go forward.
Of course, General de Gaulle’s reaction, when he was finally told of the plan to send Allied troops into his home country and the agreements reached with the Vichy regime to achieve this, was probably only slightly less hostile than the German reaction was expected to be. De Gaulle had been declared an outlaw by Petain and his followers for what they saw as an irresponsible attitude, placing millions of Frenchmen at risk, men and women who did not have the luxury of escaping German occupation. He was also accused of selling out French interests to the British in exchange for the minimal support they gave the Free French movement. Still, he had stayed the course and rallied thousands of his countrymen to the Allied cause, both within and outside France. Now, when it seemed that the moment of victory was within view, he was to be robbed of all authority by the naive Americans who had made a pact with the devil.
An explanation of the plan for his Free French forces to command the liberation of Corsica mollified him not at all. Even when the Americans added their own 3rd Infantry Division to the invasion force, but under the command of General Koenig, he ranted that he was being shunted aside. It was only when, at a meeting of his own senior field commanders, including Koenig and Leclerc, he was told that the only apparent option, that of boycotting the entire operation and standing aside while foreigners undertook the actual liberation of French soil, would not be acceptable to his troops, that de Gaulle finally accepted the fait accompli and turned his considerable persuasive talents to the task of recruiting the mafia-like Union Corse to the cause of the liberation.
The only issue that remained to be decided was who should command the invasion force. Another sticking point with the French had initially been that Giraud had insisted on the command for himself, but Patton had pointed out that total numbers of men would not be the deciding factor, but the presence at the front of organized divisions with modern equipment. If, at the end of a few months, France had the largest force in this category, such a demand would be justified, but that was not the case now, nor would it be for some time. Since the Americans would provide the bulk of the initial force, the British had agreed that the Supreme Commander would have to be American.
Marshall was the only serious contender for the job, and he wanted it desperately. Roosevelt was extremely reluctant to lose him as chief of staff, since he had experience in handling strategy at the global level that no one else in the military possessed at that point. He also had long experience in dealing with Congress, a vital skill for the administration. However, Roosevelt recognized the entire program as Marshall’s baby, and the appointment was made. Marshall would be Supreme Commander of Allied Forces, Europe. Eisenhower would move up and take over as chief of staff, while Patton would be given overall command of the ground forces for the invasion. This last position would be eliminated once it was considered that the Allies were firmly established ashore, and Patton would revert to command of the American Fifth Army, as the combined American forces would be designated once sufficient troops were ashore.
It has been argued by historians of the period that Eisenhower was seriously considered for the post of Supreme Allied Commander, based on scattered notes and memoranda from the White House that have since come to light. Naturally, it is hard to imagine how a man who was a mere brigadier general until only recently and who had never experienced combat could have been presented as being qualified for such a command. The theory relies principally on Roosevelt’s reluctance to part with Marshall, for, despite the cool personal relations between the president and his chief of staff, Roosevelt had come to depend upon Marshall’s intelligence and grasp of the strategic big picture. One uncorroborated source from within the White House has claimed that what swung the decision in Marshall’s favor was Roosevelt’s suspicion that Eisenhower was too easily impressed by the British and too likely to knuckle under to British demands in the inter-allied squabbles that would inevitably arise during the course of the campaign. Eisenhower, from his close contacts with General Dill and other British officers, had apparently taken to referring to lunch as “tiffin” and to gasoline as “petrol.” Considering the fact that Eisenhower had only spent short visits in England, this kind of cultural assimilation does imply a certain malleability m Eisenhower’s personality that it is perhaps just as well was never put to a test.
With all of the agreements signed and the planning completed, it only remained for Marshall to pick a date for the assault. By the second half of October, the units involved had been trained up to standard, the required shipping gathered, and the loading of thousands of tons of equipment, supplies, and munitions begun. The timing would now depend upon finding the optimal moment for the attack in relation to events on other battlefields of the war. In North Africa, Rommel’s offensive into Egypt had been stopped cold by 1 September, and General Montgomery, who had recently taken command of Eighth Army, was steadily building his strength for a counteroffensive. This was scheduled to start on 23 October, and Marshall wanted to wait at least until the offensive had begun to gain ground, focusing German attention on that front, before making his own move.
Events on the Russian Front, however, promised to be even more significant. Once it had been decided to proceed with HAYMAKER, American Ambassador in Moscow, Averill Harriman, met with Stalin on 20 October and briefed him in person on the plans for the second front. While this met the demands that the Soviets had been making of the Western Allies for months, Stalin retained his usual reserve, implying that he would believe it when he saw it. The only concession of significance from the Russians came over a week later when Marshal Georgi Zhukhov suddenly called for a meeting with Harriman and outlined for him, in very vague terms, a Soviet plan for an offensive designed to cut off the German Sixth Army, along with the armies of their Romanian and Hungarian satellites, at Stalingrad. Zhukhov would only state that the Soviets had concentrated sufficient forces in the area to destroy these three armies and tear a huge hole in the German front, with a probable jump-off date of mid-November. He suggested that, if the Allies timed their own landings to occur shortly after the collapse of the Stalingrad line, they might catch German reinforcements en route to help plug the gap, too far away from France to be of use there, and not yet arrived in Russia. The indecision and likely changes in direction this would cause might well result in substantial German units not taking part in either battle but spending crucial days being shunted around railroad marshalling yards.
This idea made perfect sense to Marshall, who noted to Roosevelt that it was the first time that the Soviets had seen fit to share a significant piece of strategic information with the Western Allies. In one late-night meeting, Roosevelt briefly brought up his desire to get American troops into the fight before Election Day on 3 November. Marshall coldly replied that he would resign before committing American troops to combat ten minutes ahead of time for purely political reasons. Roosevelt did not reply and never raised the matter again. D-Day would now be postponed until at least the third week in November.
This gave rise, briefly, to a concern that Montgomery would drive Rommel’s Afrika Korps so swiftly that the Germans would be tempted to seize Tunisia in order to give themselves more maneuver room and to shorten their supply lines. The Vichy French had, for some time, been allowing the Axis to ship supplies for Rommel through the port of Bizerte—and this practice was to continue right up until the Allied landings, to avoid making the Germans suspicious—but an actual Axis conquest of the territory would have thrown the Allied timetable off considerably. Fortunately, Rommel conducted such a masterful retreat and Montgomery such a leisurely pursuit from Egypt that by mid November Rommel was still holding a line at Mersa Brega in central Libya, over four hundred miles east of the Tunisian border, more or less at the point from which he had begun both his 1941 and 1942 offensives. There was, therefore, no undue pressure on the Germans to invade Tunisia to obtain maneuver room to the rear. In fact, by the time of the landings in France, Rommel would have only retreated to Buerat, another one hundred miles to the west but with several hundred miles of Libyan Desert behind him.
In the event, the Soviet offensive was postponed as Stalin and his commanders poured still more men and guns into the vast trap that would spring on the Germans at Stalingrad, and HAYMAKER was pushed back into December. As D-Day approached, and as it became increasingly clear to the British that the Americans were actually going to go through with the operation, Churchill ordered full cooperation by his staff, since a disaster in southern France could set the Allied cause back months, if not years, and any hint that his intransigence might have contributed to such a disaster could cripple the alliance forever. It was a team of British intelligence officers, therefore, who came up with the idea of “the man that never was,” a carefully concocted and scrupulously supported scheme to convince the Germans that the Allied landings in southern France, about which rumors were rife throughout Europe, was a diversion at best. They went so far as to find a recently deceased man, who had died in a mountaineering accident of exposure, and preserved his body. They had then fitted the body out as a British staff officer and dropped him off the coast of Spain, on the assumption that the Spanish authorities would certainly pass the information on to the Germans, but that lack of local technical skill would reduce the chances of the enemy discovering the fraud through timely forensic evaluation. They then sequestered the actual staff officer whose identity they had used, making it look as if he had indeed perished en route to Gibraltar carrying a copy of battle plans which were now safely in German hands. These “plans” would detail an Allied intent for a massive landing at Calais, exactly where Hitler expected it. It proved to be one of the intelligence coups of the war.
The convoys bearing nearly half of the American contingent for the invasion departed directly from several American ports and followed a zigzag route across the Atlantic. The Canadians and other American units were brought down from the British Isles, and the Free French shipped out of Egypt. In a tremendous stroke of luck, the eastbound convoys were apparently not even sighted by the enemy until passing through Gibraltar, and only subjected to one unsuccessful U-boat attack. The Free French convoy from Egypt was found near Sicily by an Italian submarine which scored a single torpedo hit against a transport, but the ship managed to limp on to Corsica while the destroyer escorts drove off the attacker.
The last act came when the elderly General Weygand was taken out to sea in a fishing smack and picked up in the dark of night by a British Short-land flying boat off the port of Sète and brought into Gibraltar in total secrecy. He spent the better part of the next day overflying the huge mass of shipping and actually went aboard the flagship Augusta to meet the commander of the naval force, Rear Admiral H. Kent Hewitt, and General Patton for a quick lunch. He then returned to France to report to Marshal Petain that the Allied invasion force was larger than he had ever seen. In fact, it was the largest amphibious invasion force ever assembled in history.
CHAPTER 3
POUNCE!
1030 HOURS, 19 DECEMBER 1942
NEAR LA SPEZIA, ITALY
ENSIGN CECIL FIELDING eased back on the stick of his Royal Navy Albacore biplane and wished he had something a little more modem with which to face his first encounter with the enemy. The fact that the Albacore was newer than the Swordfish torpedo planes that had succeeded in crippling the German battleship Bismarck earlier in the war did not alter the fact that both aircraft were hopelessly obsolete and that he would not stand a ghost of a chance if he should encounter enemy fighters. His squadron commander had assured the men of his flight at the briefing in the wee hours of the morning that they did not expect much hostile fighter activity, and a squadron of Sea Hurricanes from his carrier, Furious, would be flying top cover for them on the mission. Still, with a huge torpedo strapped to the underside of his fuselage, his Albacore was dreadfully slow and did not even have the superior maneuverability that biplanes allegedly enjoyed over their single-winged counterparts. With only a pair of Vickers machine guns facing forward and a single Lewis gun in the rear observer’s seat, Fielding felt decidedly naked in his open cockpit.
There was nothing for it, however, and Fielding followed the lead plane in his flight as it banked toward the coast, with the headland of Portovenere off to his right, flying as low as they dared, as they headed toward the Italian naval base at La Spezia. Just two years earlier, British carrier planes had struck a brilliant blow by staging a night torpedo raid on the Italian base at Taranto, crippling four battleships and a cruiser at the cost of only two aircraft. The captain of the Furious had cautioned the men not to expect such an easy time of it on this occasion, since neither the Italians nor anyone else had thought such an attack possible in 1940, but now they new better. But in support of the major Allied offensive that was underway, the captain had asked them to do something “fairly spectacular” by way of giving the Italian Navy a bloody nose and encouraging them to stay out of the way. That was why the attack would be coming in from the north, sweeping over the town of La Spezia itself and hitting the fleet from the landward side on the assumption that most of the base’s defenses would be oriented against an attack from the sea.
From the view Fielding got when he leveled off for the run down the bay leading south from La Spezia, it appeared that the Italians would take a good deal of encouragement to sit out this campaign. A massive column of ships was under steam and proceeding majestically down the waterway toward the open sea. From hours of studying his enemy vessel recognition manual in his cramped bunk on the Furious, Fielding readily identified three battleships: Roma, Vittorio Veneto, and Italia, followed by several cruisers and escorted by a swarm of destroyers. His mind swam as he quickly tried to tote up the number of anti-aircraft guns in the fleet. Each battleship carried a dozen 3.5 inch guns plus 40 machine guns, times three, plus about three dozen guns for each cruiser, times about six, plus maybe twenty guns for each destroyer. He gave up the effort before even considering the guns that would also be firing from the shore just as his flight leader banked hard to port to bring the aircraft in at an angle to the enemy column to give them a broad flank shot at the huge ships. Fielding wished vainly that he had been assigned to one of the aircraft that would drop 1,500-pound mines at the entrance to the bay and then serenely return to the carrier, their job done.
In fact, flak was already bursting around him as the surprised gunners near the port belatedly spotted the British planes and sent up s
treams of tracers and heavier shells that bloomed in small black clouds like little mushrooms popping up after a good rain. Fielding gave thanks as he gripped the vibrating controls that the Albacore, for all its slowness and clumsiness, was a damn tough plane, rather like a bloody dinosaur with a brain the size of a walnut, and it only had one or two vital parts that would have to be hit to bring it down. Unfortunately, he reflected, he was one of those parts, and he found the armored seat under his backside of very limited comfort as his craft was buffeted by exploding flak that peppered the wings and fuselage like deadly hail.
The idea was to sink or damage one or two of the big ships as they tried to leave the protected harbor, possibly blocking the channel with their carcasses. If that failed, the attack from the rear might serve to drive the survivors out into the open where a pair of British submarines lay in wait for them and might force the ships to maintain speed that would make it hard for them to avoid the floating mines that had been laid in the approaches to the harbor. If they still had their hearts set on a sortie, there was an Allied squadron just east of Corsica. The Italians’ formation would undoubtedly be jumbled from the attacks from above and below, and they would have to face the guns of the Royal Navy battleships Duke of York and Rodney, the battlecruiser Renown, and the American battleship Massachusetts and a pair of cruisers, plus a host of destroyers, with Furious providing air cover. The Allies could have launched their attack earlier, at dawn, but it had been thought best to let the Italians get word of the landings and come out from behind their torpedo nets and other fixed defenses. If they could be brought to battle out in the open, and destroyed once and for all, the Allies could divert a significant portion of their naval power out of the Mediterranean, to the Pacific for instance, but if the Italian fleet remained a “fleet in being,” safe in port, a comparable Allied force would have to remain on hand to counter it.
Second Front: The Allied Invasion of France, 1942–43 (An Alternative History) Page 10
