At that point, Winston Churchill intervened—Greece needed reinforcements—and halted O’Connor. Many of those troops never returned, as the Germans handed the British successive defeats in Greece and Crete. Meanwhile, Hitler reinforced Axis forces in Libya, dispatching General Erwin Rommel and the Afrika Korps. In April Rommel drove the British out of Libya entirely, except for Australians holding the fortress of Tobruk. Early in the campaign a German scouting party captured a British staff car containing O’Connor and two other British generals, and the resulting loss of its command structure threw the British army into disarray. One indicator of O’Connor’s value came when the overall commander of British forces in the Middle East, Sir Archibald Wavell, offered to exchange O’Connor for any six Italian generals of choice; there were no takers.
Rommel, who would be made the youngest field marshal in the German Army after his successes in 1942, was a Swabian, the son of a schoolmaster. A short, solidly built, wiry man, Rommel had blue eyes, unbounded energy, and a quick mind. Myths surround him: contrary to legend, he was never a Nazi Party member, never a member of the Freikorps, never a policeman, and never a storm trooper.33 His family was solid middle-class with no military tradition, but when his father forbade him from seeking employment at the Friedrichshafen Zeppelin plant, he joined the army as an officer cadet. From this background of moderate means and no connections, essentially ineligible to join the General Staff, under normal circumstances he could have expected to retire as a major at best.
During World War I Rommel fought on the Western Front, where he won an Iron Cross 2nd Class, and later the Iron Cross 1st Class. Promoted to lieutenant, he was sent to Romania, then in 1917 to Italy, where with only 5 men, he captured 43 officers and 1,500 men, and was awarded the coveted Pour le Mérite (the Blue Max), Germany’s highest decoration. Between the wars he advanced steadily until his manual, Infanterie Greift An (“Infantry Attacks”), attracted the attention of higher-ranking officers and Hitler himself. After he commanded Hitler’s escort battalion, he emerged as a favorite. His performance as commander of the 7th Panzer Division in France brought him acclaim as a master of panzer tactics. Promoted to lieutenant general, he assumed command of the German troops in Libya. Later, he would oppose the Allied landings on D-Day, join the July 20, 1944, plot against Hitler, and pay with his life.
Rommel’s primary problem lay not in his British enemies, but in obtaining support from the German High Command. There was a nagging and unending issue of insufficient supplies, for which transport to Libya was an Italian responsibility. His was an unimportant theater to High Command, and not without reason. Unless Hitler could convince Turkey to enter the war on the Axis side, he possessed no way to transport Middle Eastern oil to Germany. Already, the Royal Navy, supported by the U.S. Navy and merchant marine, had kept Malta open despite increasing raids and Gibraltar had never been captured. Nor could Rommel guess that the British were reading his communications. Penetration of communications with the Italian High Command via Enigma machines gave the British notice of all sailings of supply ships, and the Desert Fox was often fortunate to receive any supplies at all. Air raids from Malta constituted a sharp thorn he could not overcome.
Failing in the siege of Tobruk in 1941 and exhausting his forces in the subsequent fights, Rommel fell back to his starting point at El Agheila in January 1942. Resupplied and reinforced, he bounced back in May 1942, heavily defeated the British in the Battle of Gazala and took Tobruk in a walk, capturing more than 32,000 prisoners. Driving into Egypt, he was forced to halt at El Alamein. Rommel had outrun his supply line and was henceforth unable to meet the British on reasonably equal terms. His immediate superior, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, had advised him to go no farther east than Tobruk, but the pressure from Hitler to seize the Suez Canal grew too great.34 A glance at the vast discrepancy in supplies explains the hopelessness of Rommel’s efforts: in August 1942, the Afrika Korps received 13,000 tons of supplies; the British 8th Army, 500,000 tons. General Bernard Montgomery assumed command of the British 8th Army in August and transformed the atmosphere in his army from defeatist to optimistic. Aloof and arrogant, Montgomery was a caricature of the snooty, elitist British officer, but a man who occasionally fought well. His tank superiority over Rommel topped ten to one by the time he went on the offensive (not counting the useless Italian models) and his manpower advantage, two to one. Down to only thirty operational tanks and in defiance of Hitler’s order, Rommel asked to be allowed to retreat to a defensible position where he could be supplied, but Hitler forbade a withdrawal. Suffering from jaundice and unable to lead from the front as was his custom, Rommel retreated, and in September, returned to Germany for medical treatment.
While the Axis was advancing on all fronts, Britain and the United States were hammering out a strategy to eventually win the war. FDR and Churchill agreed to a policy of “Europe First,” meaning that the bulk of their efforts would be directed against Germany before turning to Japan. In practice, this was ameliorated by American public opinion and its anger against the Japanese, and by Admiral Ernest King, chief of naval operations, who made sure most naval forces were diverted to the Pacific. He would later be criticized for the excessive losses among the American merchant marine in the Atlantic, but his primary concern was the regular Navy. As a result, it was more dangerous to be in the merchant marine during World War II than in the U.S. Navy.
U.S. generals, led by General Marshall and his protégé, Dwight D. Eisenhower, favored an early invasion of continental Europe across the English Channel. The British Imperial Staff, headed by Field Marshal Alan Brooke, considered the Americans to be rank amateurs, echoing the sentiments of British commanders in North Africa who referred to them as “our Italians.”35 Dwight David Eisenhower possessed no combat experience, and had been elevated from an obscure lieutenant colonel to commanding general in only sixteen months. The British were intransigent, holding that a cross-Channel invasion would not be feasible until 1944, if then. Churchill favored a Mediterranean strategy that would reestablish British hegemony in the area, and American proposals of Roundup, the cross-Channel invasion, and Sledgehammer, a contingency plan to help the Soviets if they neared collapse by making a landing in the French Pas-de-Calais region, were discarded. Instead, Operation Torch, an invasion of French North Africa, was proposed and agreed to on July 22. Accordingly, planning began on Torch, and Eisenhower was placed in command, much to the consternation of the French generals Charles de Gaulle and Henri Giraud, both of whom expected to lead the North African invasion.
In November 1942 British and American forces finally went on the ground offensive on the Western Front with Torch, a three-pronged amphibious assault that seized key ports and airfields from Algeria to Morocco. General George Patton commanded the Western Task Force of 35,000 troops, landing near Casablanca, Rabat, and Safi, northwest of Marrakech. The Center Task Force, with 18,000 men, under General Lloyd R. Fredendall, landed at Oran, and the Eastern Task Force, headed by British lieutenant general Kenneth Anderson, moved ashore at Algiers. The strategy at Casablanca called for the Allies to withhold a bombardment, under the hope that French troops would not fight back, but after French batteries opened up, Allied warships returned fire. A few French warships sallied forth and were destroyed. Oran likewise surrendered after a brief battle, as did Algiers. Hoping to solidify authority in the region with minimal effort, Eisenhower, with the initial and unenthusiastic backing of Roosevelt and Churchill, offered Vichy French admiral Jean Darlan control of French North Africa if he would join the Allies, meaning that Vichy France technically would remain in power. But Darlan was murdered by a member of the French Resistance on December 24, by which time Hitler and Mussolini had occupied Vichy France and reinforced Axis units in North Africa.
Convinced they could no longer trust France’s commitments, the Germans initiated Operation Lila on November 27 to seize the French fleet at Toulon, whereupon units from the 7th Panzer Division rolled into the city and toward the
docks. The French transmitted orders to scuttle the fleet, and just as the German tanks reached the piers, ship after ship exploded. More than seventy-five vessels, including three battleships and seven cruisers, were destroyed. Some cruisers were restored by the Italians later, and General De Gaulle was outraged that the Vichy admirals had not sailed the fleet to Algiers. Nonetheless, the event rendered France a complete nonplayer in future naval considerations.
Germany established a holding force in Tunisia, awaiting Rommel’s westward retreat from Libya. Montgomery, in what would become a nagging point of criticism, pursued slowly (some would say, glacially), allowing Rommel to turn on the Americans. Reinforced Afrika Korps units attacked in February 1943, striking General Fredendall’s forces at Kasserine Pass, a disastrous encounter that showed the Americans’ lack of combat experience, poor leadership, lack of coordination, and inadequate training: some of the G.I.s had never fired live ammunition. Even before Kasserine, Alan Brooke, a constantly pessimistic artilleryman whose main claim to military expertise was his troop handling during the British withdrawal from the Continent in 1940, had lobbied through Churchill to relieve Eisenhower of operational command. As Brooke said in his diary, “Eisenhower…had neither the tactical nor strategic experience required.” In installing General Sir Harold Alexander as Eisenhower’s deputy and placing operations in his hands, Brooke said, “We were pushing Eisenhower up into the stratosphere…where he would be free to devote his time to the political and inter-allied problems, whilst we inserted…our own commanders to deal with the military situations…”36
Kasserine, with 1,000 dead and a total of 6,500 casualties, marked one of the most embarrassing military defeats in American history, ranking with the Bladensburg Races in 1814 and the Little Bighorn in infamy. Fredendall, who had remained safe in a concrete bunker far behind the lines, was sacked, replaced by Patton. But Patton would not face Rommel, who had returned to Germany to plead with Hitler for a withdrawal from Tunisia, a maneuver that resulted in his removal from command. Without their daring leader and experiencing increasing shortages of supply, the Germans who remained were doomed. A combined British-American offensive from March to May forced the Axis troops into a pocket. After the British took Tunis and the Americans took Bizerte, all the remaining Axis forces—nearly a quarter of a million Germans and Italians—went into the bag.
Part of the Axis failure in North Africa stemmed from an inability to eliminate the island base of Malta, which came under repeated attacks by German air. The island sat astride Axis supply lines, its aircraft roaming far out to sink and harass shipping. Just as Doolittle’s men sent a message from their carriers in the Pacific, so too little Malta signaled defiance. Germany made an all-out effort in February 1942 to wipe out the island’s defenses, and in a six-month period, more than six thousand tons of bombs rained down on the island. In June 1942, German attacks had become so devastating, sinking thirty-seven supply ships, that the fate of the bastion rested on a single ship and its cargo, the world’s fastest tanker, the SS Ohio. Through the efforts of two Americans, Frederick Larsen and Francis Dales, who manned guns to keep the Luftwaffe attackers at bay, the Ohio limped into Malta with decks awash to deliver tons of precious oil that kept the aircraft, generators, and antiaircraft operations alive.37
G.I.s, Joes, or Jive?
Subsequent criticism by historians of the American military capabilities during the war remained muted at the time, thanks to heavy, and arguably much-needed, censorship of the press under the Roosevelt and Churchill administrations. But the U.S. Army’s performance at Kasserine and later battles ignited much discussion after the war over the effectiveness of American troops, especially as contrasted with that of German units. S.L.A. Marshall concluded that 25 percent of American infantrymen failed to fire their weapons in combat. Other writers such as Martin van Creveld presented a devastating attack on the American replacement system in which new recruits were constantly fed into units individually rather than withdrawing units from battle and allowing time for veterans and replacements to regain unit cohesion. Such a process, it was argued, lowered unit cohesion and effectiveness, leaving replacements as outsiders who died like flies before their comrades even learned their names. However, some authors have risen to the American G.I.’s defense, one of the most recent being Peter R. Mansoor, who cited the fact that historians sometimes compared American line troops with SS panzer divisions—the elite of the German army in 1943 and afterward—and when U.S. Rangers, for instance, were measured against those SS units, their performance was roughly equivalent.38 There are many factors making a one-to-one analysis difficult, such as that American infantry divisions were fully mechanized, enjoyed air supremacy and excellent supply, while the German Landsers (G.I.s) possessed no such benefits.
Without question, the German Army had the advantage of having the years from 1934 to 1940 to train and build its force, whereas the Americans had only four years, from 1940 to 1944. Certainly the paramilitary training German youth received before being conscripted played a part in accelerating their effectiveness, although Boy Scout training and the familiarity with firearms by rural American youth tended to balance this out. In Germany, monoethnic and monocultural units were formed from localities and kept together as much as possible to foster unit cohesion. A much different polyglot American Army contained multicultural and multiethnic units, purposely formed by assigning individuals from all parts of the country and all walks of life as if they were interchangeable parts. With extensive training, mixing such diverse groups could work, but during the replacement process, American forces suffered from the addition of soldiers who were expected to fight as a team yet didn’t know one another. Whereas American divisions received a constant stream of new, but entirely inexperienced, troops, German divisions fought themselves out, then were rotated to the rear for reorganization, filling out with replacements and training to meld them back into a cohesive unit. At any rate, the American Army performed creditably, and combat units tended to learn rapidly from their mistakes. What differences there were, if any, between the American G.I. and German Landser were a result of their respective armies’ organization, training, and policies, in particular in leadership training (German leadership training to accomplish the mission went all the way down to corporal), replacements, and rotations.
A radical difference in soldiers’ mentality and attitude could also be detected among the Americans, especially as contrasted with Russians and British. The G.I., as one analyst noted, “regarded himself as only a temporary soldier,” retaining a level of autonomous identity unique among the armies.39 During the American Revolution, Baron von Steuben, training George Washington’s soldiers, had already come to the conclusion that American fighters had to understand their orders, not just obey them: “You say to your [French or Austrian] soldier, ‘Do this’ and he doeth it; but I am obliged to say, ‘This is the reason why you ought to do that,’ and he does it.”40 Having evolved from a militia tradition where units elected their own officers and thought independently, Americans represented the epitome of the Western Way of War for better or worse on the battlefield.
Whether the upper echelons of the Army learned, or whether it was small unit improvisation that led to American victories, is hard to tell. Critics maintain that American military planning was poor, there was little understanding of the combined arms doctrine, and no one made allowances for high casualties.41 But in this war, no army did, least of all the Russians, who hurled an astonishing 600 divisions (with a total of 34 million men serving) at the Germans. This was more than five times what the Nazis had (117 divisions) when they invaded Russia in June 1941, not counting satellite forces. During the five years the Soviets were at war, they put over 20 percent of their population in uniform, compared with 24 percent for Germany and only 11 percent for the United States. The Soviets lost more than 8.7 million men from 1941 to 1943 alone, and losses topped 13 million over the course of the war. This constituted a jaw-dropping 37 percent military
death rate, exceeding Germany’s 35 percent rate, and dwarfing the U.S. military death rate of 2.5 percent. Simply put, the American approach was to employ firepower whenever possible to minimize casualties, and the Soviets appeared not to care.
What U.S. experience showed was that the high levels of individuality and exceptional battlefield autonomy possessed by G.I.s made improvisation not only possible, but routine. Consider the hedgerows in Normandy, which tanks could not climb over without exposing their vulnerable underbellies, and enemy troops could lurk on the hidden back side to threaten infantry. A sergeant, Curtis Culin of the 102nd Cavalry Recon Squadron, welded steel teeth to his unit’s tank. The teeth dug into the embankment and created a gap in the hedgerow without exposing either the tank or the men, an innovation soon widely used and known as the “Rhinoceros” attachment.42 It was not a naval board or even an admiral, but a machinist on the USS Yorktown, Oscar W. Myers, who determined that the USS Lexington was sunk at the Battle of Coral Sea in large part due to gasoline fires on deck caused by poor fuel control. On the spot, Myers invented a system of draining the carrier’s fuel pipes after use and filling them with inert CO2 gas. After Captain Elliott Buckmaster approved of the project, the Yorktown was outfitted with the new system, which likely saved the ship from a calamitous fire after a direct bomb hit during the Battle of Midway.43
Death from the Skies
America’s insistence that her troops be more than just cannon fodder and that every precaution be taken to reduce casualties played out in the bombing campaign that unfolded over Europe. Where the British pursued the phantom goal of breaking German morale, thereby reducing industrial output, the Americans homed in on destroying the Luftwaffe and German industry and transportation facilities supplying its frontline troops. If that required destroying industries and cities in the process, c’est la vie. This long-term strategy was elaborated on at an April 1942 meeting, where General Ira Eaker informed Allied leadership, “The prime purpose of our operations over here…is to make the Luftwaffe come up and fight. If you will support the bomber offensive, I guarantee the Luftwaffe will not prevent the cross-channel invasion.”44 The thousand-plane raids of early summer 1943 were just a warm-up. In August, General Curtis LeMay led a massive series of attacks on the Schweinfurt ball-bearing plants, meeting unprecedented resistance in which the Luftwaffe unleashed relentless, head-on attacks. One bomb group leader noted that B-17s were falling from the sky so fast it “became useless to report them.”45 By the time they reached the first ball-bearing factories, 8th Air Force had lost 32 of the 330 bombers that began the mission, and lost still more on the way home. The final casualty rate was 20 percent, but the blow delivered to the Nazis was even more crushing, reducing ball-bearings production by almost 40 percent. The Americans begged the British to follow up, but the British Air Staff found excuse after excuse not to attack, and once again, Speer observed, “we barely escaped a further catastrophe.”46 For all the widespread damage caused by British night bombing, the Germans had come up with an effective defense created by General Josef Kammhuber’s Nachtjagd-Division, or night-hunting force. Kammhuber had coordinated flak, searchlights, and well-spaced fighter forces. Using searchlights to “time” the airspeed of a bomber, nearby fighters had three minutes to find it in the light and kill it or search for another target. The bombers entered a chain of searchlights some eighteen miles deep, divided into quadrants of sixty-inch searchlights, then ran a gauntlet of night fighters. The Hamburg raid had been particularly effective due to a new radar-thwarting tactic of dropping tin foil strips known as “Window,” which filled German radar screens with snow. But the Germans countered Window fairly quickly, and it proved less useful from that time forward.
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