Making his chiefs fly to Casablanca had, he found, already worked—without British intervention. Once in Morocco, Marshall had finally talked to Allied commanders on the battlefield. As Marshall now confessed in the villa’s bordello-like bedroom, he had spoken not only to Admiral Mountbatten—the British chief of Combined Operations, who’d been responsible for the disastrous Dieppe landings—but at great length with General Mark Clark. Clark had been Eisenhower’s deputy in the Torch invasion, and had just been promoted to command the U.S. Fifth Army in Morocco, both to defend against mythical German invasion across the Mediterranean and prepare for future offensive operations. General Clark had informed the chief of staff of the U.S. Army that there was no chance of a cross-Channel operation succeeding in the summer of 1943.
No chance whatever.
This was music to the President’s ears—for he had half-expected to have to do battle once again against his own team, lest in the interval since their meeting in the Oval Office on January 7 they revert to their insistence on a cross-Channel invasion in 1943.
General Clark’s battlefield testimony, however, had applied the necessary dose of cold reality. Clark—a man who certainly did not lack courage, having fetched General Henri Giraud from Vichy-held southern France in person by submarine to assist in the Torch invasion—had been emphatic. To Marshall he’d explained that “there must be a long period of training before any attempt is made to land against determined resistance”—especially Wehrmacht resistance of the kind that would meet a cross-Channel invasion. In particular he’d “pointed out many of the mishaps that occurred in the landing in North Africa which would have been fatal had the resistance been more determined,” as Marshall now relayed to the President.6 In fact, General Clark had himself undergone a Pauline conversion. In London, the previous summer, he’d deplored the idea of landings in Northwest Africa as an unnecessary “sideshow.” Now, however, he felt American amphibious operations in 1943 “could be mounted more efficiently from North Africa”—and certainly with less loss of life—than from the British Isles and the United States, across the English Channel.7
Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, the fighting general had made clear to Marshall, was no joke. The American military was not up to such a gargantuan task, he’d realized—and was backed by the latest British planning reports. The British, it seemed, had done the numbers that Marshall’s team had failed to appreciate in Washington. They looked formidable. As General Brooke had pointed out in his first presentation on January 14, the day before, at the Anfa Hotel, “the rail net in Europe would permit the movement of seven [German] divisions a day from east to west which would enable them to reinforce their defenses of the northern coast of France rapidly.”
A day?
By contrast, Marshall now acknowledged to the President, in the Mediterranean theater the Germans “can only move one division from north to south each day, in order to reinforce their defense of southern Europe.”8
If the U.S. armies were to acquire the combat experience necessary to assault Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, then it would best be gained in the Mediterranean, at the extremity of German lines of communication. Northern France was, by contrast, the very closest to the German border. General Clark thus favored a continuation of the war in the Mediterranean, Marshall admitted to the President, where “the lines of communication” for the Allies would be “shorter,” and where the “troops in North Africa have had experience in landing operations.” Not only did the Allies already possess sufficient American and British forces in the Mediterranean—naval, air, and ground—to knock Italy out of the war that year by invading Sardinia or Sicily “once the Axis had been forced out of Tunisia,” but, as Clark had pointed out, the Mediterranean offered the opportunity for U.S. units to gain the battle exposure they needed, in a relatively secure environment where even local setbacks would not be disastrous to Allied strategy. This was something that could not be said for a premature cross-Channel assault.
Lest there be any misunderstanding, the necessary “training” for eventual combat against tough German defenders of the West Wall, Clark had repeated to Marshall, would be infinitely “more effective if undertaken in close contact with the enemy,” in current combat. Not in the United States or Britain, Clark had insisted, but in real time, in the Mediterranean.9
In the strangest of venues, then, reality had finally set in. The Mediterranean, not northern France, should be the proving ground for as-yet-untested U.S. troops, Marshall now agreed—not only in terms of combat but in developing effective coalition command in 1943—operations involving British, Canadian, French, and other forces, on a front where the Allies could steadily improve their fighting skills, however much the Russians would, doubtless, complain. Not to mention Marshall’s Pentagon team.
Headed by Brigadier General Wedemeyer, Marshall’s operations planners would be devastated, the President was aware—as would the secretary of war, Mr. Stimson. But Wedemeyer and Stimson were suffering from delusion—dangerous delusion. However doggedly they urged a cross-Channel attack that year, it was not their lives that would be on the line, but the lives of tens of thousands of Americans—facing a Wehr- macht whose true fighting ability they had not even begun to measure.
It was, as Captain McCrea recalled, a “long conference in the President’s bed room” and one that only “broke up well past noon.”10
This was, in retrospect, the turning point of the war, in terms of the Allied military struggle against the Axis powers—clinching not only the strategy but the timing of America’s game plan in conducting World War II. Mass American suicide in a premature Second Front would once again be avoided that year, thanks to the President’s military realism. Instead, mercifully, the United States military would back only those operations that promised success: success that would boost morale at home and validate the President’s step-by-step strategy for prosecuting the war.
Victory rather than disaster: this would now be the order of the day.
As General Clark had now recommended, U.S. forces would be instructed to learn their deadly trade on the periphery of Europe that year, before meeting the deadliest challenge in 1944: one that even Hitler had balked at attempting in 1940, when Britain was on its knees: a massive cross-Channel invasion. Finally, after thirteen months of war, the Commander in Chief and his chiefs of staff were on the same page.
General Marshall’s belated recognition, on January 15, that the President’s strategy was probably right would now cement the methodical, stone-by-stone U.S. progress in World War II. The question of “What next?” after Tunisia was, effectively, over—before the first plenary session of the Combined Chiefs of Staff meetings began at the Anfa Hotel that afternoon.
American grand strategy for 1943 was clear: attritional warfare at the extremity of the enemy’s lines of communication, enabling U.S. forces to learn how to defeat the Wehrmacht in battle.
And to make sure this policy had a good chance of succeeding, the President said he wanted to see the general commanding the Allies in the Mediterranean from his headquarters in Algiers: young General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Eisenhower seemed to the President to be a bit “jittery” as, shortly before 4:00 p.m. on January 15, the two men sat down by the picture window in the President’s villa, Dar es Saada.
It was for a good reason. General Dwight Eisenhower, or Ike, as he was familiarly known, had undergone a hair-raising flight from Algiers to see the President and the chiefs of staff. Two of his Flying Fortress’s engines had conked out, and he’d been told he must get ready to parachute from the aircraft. This he’d begun to do—chiding, as he did so, his naval aide for the time it was taking him to refasten one of his general’s shoulder pins, which had been accidentally knocked out. “Haven’t you ever fastened a star before?” Ike had barked at the hapless officer, whose hands were shaking uncontrollably. “Yes, sir, but never with a parachute on,” the aide had squeaked.11
Fortunately the pilot had nursed the surviving two
engines long enough to land at Medouina airport, and Eisenhower had immediately been driven to the Anfa Hotel to appear before the Combined Chiefs of Staff.
Dissatisfied by Allied progress—or lack of progress—in Tunisia, the Combined Chiefs of Staff had treated the young general roughly, expressing frank disappointment at his failure to seize Tunis at the very start of the campaign, and also at the German rebuff given to his second attempt, earlier that month.
Eisenhower’s logistical excuses had seemed somewhat lame to the chiefs, more than two months after the Torch landings. On paper, after all, he possessed more than three hundred thousand soldiers under his command in Northwest Africa, ranged against “only” sixty-five thousand German troops in Tunisia. His latest plan for an end run—an armored right-hook thrusting out of the Tunisian mountains toward the sea at Sfax, designed to carve a wedge between von Arnim’s army in Tunisia and Rommel’s retreating army in Libya—sounded ill-conceived to General Brooke, who’d had actual battle experience against German forces in the spring and summer of 1940. Ultra decrypts that very day had shown Rommel to be dispatching the veteran Twenty-First Panzer Division from Libya to deal with just such an Allied threat. Instead of dividing and conquering the German forces in North Africa, the Anglo-American forces might themselves be split apart. Where was the doctrine of concentration of force rather than dispersion of effort—dispersion that could only encourage the Germans to see their chance to counterattack and defeat the Allies in detail?12
“Eisenhower is hopeless!” Brooke had noted in frustration in his diary, in late December, reflecting that the American general “submerges himself in politics and neglects his military duties, partly, I’m afraid, because he knows little if anything about military matters.”13
Brooke was not alone in his criticism of Eisenhower. While “spying out the land” for the President and Prime Minister’s visit, Brigadier Jacob, too, had been appalled by Eisenhower’s Allied headquarters. “The chief impression I got was of a general air of restless confusion, with everyone trying their best in unnatural conditions. I was assured on all sides that there was no Anglo-American friction at all. But the simple fact of having a mixed staff is quite enough to reduce the overall efficiency by at least a half . . . The British members of the staff, who occupy many of the key positions, have to work with U.S. officers who are entirely ignorant and inexperienced, and have to operate on a system which is quite different from the one to which they are accustomed. They find their task harassing and irritating in the extreme. Many are inclined to doubt whether a combined Allied Staff is a practical arrangement, and think the experiment should not be repeated, and should be brought to an end as soon as possible.”14
Emerging from his interrogation by the chiefs at the Anfa Hotel, Eisenhower suspected his number might be up as coalition commander in chief in the theater. “His neck is on the noose, and he knows it,” even his naval aide, Lieutenant Commander Harry Butcher, noted in his diary.15 At his headquarters in town General Patton recorded the same. “He thinks his thread is about to be cut,” Patton would scribble, after talking with Ike—urging Eisenhower to “go to the front” instead of returning to the huge Allied headquarters in Algeria, many hundreds of miles behind the fighting.16
Roosevelt, however, saw things differently—very differently. From the President’s point of view, Eisenhower had done extremely well—indeed, given the friction that would arise between de Gaulle and General Giraud over control of French anti-Vichy forces, Ike had achieved miracles in planting the American flag across Vichy-held Algeria and Morocco in only a few weeks, leaving no real chance the Germans could strike the Allies in the flank, as Secretary Stimson and General Marshall feared.
The fact remained: whether General Brooke liked it or not, only an American supreme commander was going to be able to direct the campaign. For good or ill, a system of workable coalition command, in combat, had still to be developed—and it was a blessing that the President had journeyed, as U.S. commander in chief, to see Eisenhower in person, in the active theater of war, whatever might be the disappointments of the British and American chiefs of staff.
Having first put the young general at ease, the President thus listened with interest as Dwight Eisenhower explained what the Allies were up against in advancing across the same mountain range the President had overflown in Morocco, as well as the atrocious mud and winter weather conditions in Tunisia. Hitler had managed to get sixty-five thousand German troops across the Mediterranean from Italy, together with high-quality equipment, including new Panther and Tiger tanks—the latter armed with 88mm guns—but he had been aided, too, by French pusillanimity, the French forces in Tunisia failing to fire a single shot to delay, let alone stop, the Germans.
Even that French timidity had been outweighed by the political and military leadership problems with which the French had confronted Eisenhower as Allied commander in chief in Northwest Africa. General Giraud had succeeded Admiral Darlan as French commissioner, but was proving a disappointment—a “good Division Commander,” possibly, but wholly lacking in “political sense” and with “no idea of administration. He was dictatorial by nature and seemed to suffer from megalomania,” Eisenhower had already explained to the chiefs—a view he now repeated to the President. “In addition,” Giraud “was very sensitive and always ready to take offense. He did not seem to be a big enough man to carry the burden of civil government in any way. It had been far easier,” Eisenhower remarked candidly, “to deal with Admiral Darlan,” despite Darlan’s record as a Pétainite Nazi appeaser.17
The President laughed. If only his many critics in America knew! Feckless French troops were deserting by the hundreds, in the field, rather than risk their lives against the ruthless Wehrmacht. So much for coalition fighting. Getting the French to stop squabbling amongst themselves over currency, supplies, pensions, and administrative aspects of the U.S. occupation had also proven a minefield—permitting Eisenhower, as the general himself acknowledged, too little time to focus properly on the battlefront, where progress had been painfully slow. The Wehrmacht forces facing U.S. troops in the Gafsa and Tébessa sectors were, Eisenhower made clear, first class. The “opposition was tough,” Elliott Roosevelt—who was acting as his father’s aide-de-camp—recorded, “while we were just beginning to learn about war first hand.”18
This was exactly the kind of honest appraisal the President wanted to hear, from the lips of the top U.S. commander in the theater—confirming what General Clark had told General Marshall.
“No excuses, I take it,” the President commented.
“No, sir. Just hard work.” Or fighting.
In which case, the President raised the next question, what was the general’s estimate of how long it would take to clear North Africa of Axis forces?
At the White House in late November, 1942, General Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, had personally assured the President that fighting would be over by mid-January 1943. It was now mid-January.
“What about it? What’s your guess?” the President pressed Ike. “How long’ll it take to finish the job?”
“Can I have one ‘if,’ sir?”
The President chuckled, Elliott remembered, and bade him give his best estimate.
“With any kind of break in the weather, sir, we’ll have ’em all either in the bag or in the sea by late spring.”
“What’s late spring mean? June?”
“Maybe as early as the middle of May. June at the latest.”19
Elliott recalled being surprised by the young general’s cautious estimate, as this—five months of further campaigning—would make a switch of naval, air, and army forces to England, in order to mount a massive amphibious invasion of France across the English Channel that summer, almost impossible. The notorious fall weather would preclude a late-summer amphibious assault—as Hitler, too, had similarly decided in the summer of 1940, after the Luftwaffe had been rebuffed in the Battle of Britain.
“Father looked sati
sfied,” Elliott clearly remembered20—and summoned the Combined Chiefs of Staff, once again, to his villa, at 5:30 p.m.
The President asked Winston Churchill to attend the meeting at the Villa Dar es Saada, too—for the session would be, in effect, a presidential briefing, backed by the President’s “active and ardent lieutenant.”
One by one the generals and admirals—Marshall, King, Arnold, Brooke, Pound, Dill—entered, together with Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, Admiral Mountbatten, General Hastings Ismay, and Harry Hopkins. Once seated, the President asked General Eisenhower to give yet another presentation of “the situation on his front”21—an indication that, as President, he was fully behind his protégé.
The President then briefly reviewed the outlook with the assembled chieftains—and made clear to them his own preference. As Brooke noted in his diary, “we did little except that President expressed views favouring operations in the Mediterranean.”22
Aware that General Marshall might feel he’d lost face among the Combined Chiefs of Staff after arguing so hard for an end to Mediterranean operations and a switch to the U.K. for a cross-Channel attack that year, the President asked Marshall to stay behind and have dinner with him. He also invited Eisenhower.
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