Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  It would be unkind to argue that Ironclad was the best the British could do in the summer of 1942, but it was not far short. For all those critics of British policy, then and since, the invasion of Madagascar is a salutary reminder of just how slender were British resources in 1942, and how inexperienced were its forces for a major amphibious assault of the kind that Stalin urged against German-held Europe. The British Chiefs-of-Staff were even hostile to an operation as modest as Ironclad because of the disruption to shipping. As it was, the Royal Naval task force at Gibraltar had to be severely depleted to support the Madagascar invasion. If the Japanese navy had chosen to intervene, Britain could have done little to obstruct it, and the whole operation would have produced a strategic nightmare.4 How much greater were the risks and costs of a cross-Channel assault against a strongly defended coastline with limited resources. When later in the year a substantial raid was mounted on Dieppe by Canadian forces stationed in Britain the outcome was disastrous. Until the landings in North Africa later in the year, the invasion of Madagascar remained the one solid victory for the Allied cause, and it was fought not against hardened soldiers of the Axis but against an assortment of French colonial troops who had started the war as Britain’s allies and had little stomach for the conflict.

  The western Allies knew that at some point they would have to invade Europe and face their most dangerous enemy. But in the summer of 1942 they were not even sure they could save themselves against the onrush of Japan in the Pacific and Axis forces in North Africa. The choice of Madagascar was an admission of weakness, not strength. Ironclad disrupted the war effort elsewhere but was ultimately successful. The invasion of France in 1942 was operationally impossible. It took another two years before the secretive, hazardous assault on the beaches of Cap d’Ambre was writ large in Normandy.

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  From the outset the outlook for frontal assault on Hitler’s Europe seemed singularly unpromising. Before Pearl Harbor the British had discounted it as beyond their means, but even with American participation from December 1941 delays were unavoidable. The training and equipping of an Anglo-American force large enough to be confident of remaining ashore in northern Europe was a time-consuming process. The air and naval back-up needed to carry the invaders to Europe and shield their lodgement there did not yet exist in 1942, and no amount of hustling improvisation could supply them. In 1943, with subsidiary demands in the Pacific and North Africa, existing forces were spread dangerously thin. Even with large trained armies invasion held all kinds of hazard. The English Channel was an unpredictable sea. Though only 20 miles wide at its narrowest point, it had defied all attempts at invasion from Europe since 1066, a fact so well known that its significance is sometimes overlooked. Beyond the sea lay an enemy with powerful coastal defences, good communications and a large army in waiting, seasoned with men battle-hardened from the fearful contest in Russia. Tactical advantage would lie with the defender, established in prepared positions to drive back an enemy confined to narrow beach fronts and with the sea behind him.

  Worse still from the Allied point of view in 1942 were the unpredictable elements in their strategy, each of which might well have rendered invasion out of the question. It was essential that the front in the Soviet Union held. If it did not Germany would be able to swing large forces from the east to the west and make the northern French coast virtually impregnable. It was necessary for the western Allies to defeat the submarine and recapture the Atlantic sea-lanes for the shipping of troops and supplies from North America. Finally it was vital to do something about the German air force whose close support of German ground forces had been, since 1939, a critical element in German military success. In the end the Allies were able to turn the tide in all three of these campaigns, but such an outcome could not have been taken for granted in 1942 or for much of 1943. Until the picture was clearer and more favourable, preparations for invasion had more the character of contingency plans than a firm commitment. The final decisions for invasion rested on the achievement of victory in the Battle of the Atlantic, in the Red Army campaigns of the summer and autumn of 1943, and on the attrition of German air forces over the Reich in the months before June 1944. Without them invasion was a gambler’s throw.

  It is only in the light of these many problems that sense can be made of the prolonged and often bitter arguments between the two western Allies about invasion strategy. Though united in a common cause, they were anything but united on how best to prosecute it. At times relations between the two partners were strained almost to breaking point. Their first battles were fought across the conference table. There was no question but that both sides wanted to defeat Germany. The passion with which advocates from each camp defended their strategic views was testament to their conviction that they held the surer key to German collapse, and that only the obduracy and amour propre of their colleagues was preventing general approval. The differences of opinion were sharply, but honestly, held.

  From the start American military leaders and politicians were more enthusiastic about the invasion of northern Europe than the British. The American rearmament programme authorised by Roosevelt in June 1941, portentously named the Victory Programme, was based on the assumption that at some time western forces would need vast army and air equipment for re-entry to the European continent. Once the United States was at war Roosevelt’s Chief-of-Staff, General George C. Marshall, predicated American war planning on a European invasion as the only sure means of bringing German forces to defeat. His head of War Plans, Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had spent much of his military career in the Pacific, was an early convert. ‘We’ve got to go to Europe and fight … a land attack as soon as possible [sic],’ he wrote in his diary in January 1942.5 Marshall was all haste for an attack in July 1942 and Roosevelt reacted with sympathy. When it became clear that the material resources and trained men could not be procured in time, the American Chiefs-of-Staff agreed on a build-up of forces in Britain (‘Bolero’), with a view to mounting a cross-Channel assault in the spring of 1943 (‘Roundup’), or an emergency landing late in 1942 if the Soviet Front cracked (‘Sledgehammer’). To this the British half-heartedly agreed.6

  British leaders were always more cautious about invading across the Channel. They rejected the prospect of any serious attack in 1942. In July they succeeded in persuading Roosevelt that the invasion of North Africa would at least see American troops in action that year, and nothing the dismayed American Chiefs-of-Staff could do would dislodge their President’s commitment. The British agreed to begin preliminary invasion planning, but not until April 1943 was a staff established with a clear brief to explore the prospect for a frontal assault on Hitler’s Europe. A British general, Frederick Morgan, was put in charge of planning on behalf of a Supreme Allied Commander who had yet to be appointed. Morgan found the Americans ‘all in favour’, the British ‘cautious’; he thought the risk of invasion ‘appalling’.7 British leaders favoured a more indirect route to the defeat of Hitler, through the Mediterranean and the bombing of the German homeland. They stressed flexibility, and regarded American fixation with invasion as a mortgage on the future development of the war.

  During the course of 1943 the gap between the two sides grew wider. At the Casablanca conference in January 1943 no clear commitment to invasion was given. It remained one option among a number: Churchill was keen to exploit the Allied presence in North Africa by pressing into Italy and the Balkans; Roosevelt neither rejected nor confirmed this approach. Their respective staffs were left with no very clear impression of future plans. An invasion at some point in 1943 was not ruled out entirely, but both sides saw that with the current situation of forces heavily committed in North Africa and the Pacific, and with the submarine war at its most dangerous, invasion was a last resort. It was impossible to ignore the difficulties. The build-up in Britain of forces convoyed from America was much slower than anticipated. In January 1943 there were only 390,000 American servicemen in Britain, but well over half a m
illion in the Pacific. By September that year the American army had 361,000 men in Britain, but 610,000 in the Mediterranean and over 700,000 fighting the Japanese.8 The balance of forces was dictated by the circumstances of war, but it made invasion in 1943 unlikely.

  The shortage of men was compounded with a serious lack of the means to transport them across the Channel. This could only be done in purpose-built landing craft: large landing ships to transport stores and troops to the invasion zones, and smaller landing craft to carry tanks, guns and men on to the invasion beaches. Neither ally had attached much significance to the production of landing craft, but during the course of 1943 the issue came to dominate the whole invasion plan. In the spring of 1943 most landing craft were in the Pacific supporting the island-hopping campaign. In the Atlantic theatre, the American navy had only eight converted merchant ships suitable for the task and the British just eighteen. The remaining craft were supporting the Allied forces in the Mediterranean. When the deficiency finally dawned on the Allies a crash programme of production was ordered from American shipyards. By April 1943 8,719 had been built, from 4,000-ton ships to carry eighteen tanks or 33 lorries, to small beach-craft of 7 tons that could move one lorry or 36 men on to the beaches.9 Over the following year another 21,500 were procured from American shipyards, most of them smaller vessels. It was an extraordinary production achievement, but in the event it only just sufficed. All three areas of Anglo-American combat involved amphibious assault. Most landing craft went to the Pacific. When Morgan’s planners did the shipping sums there was little left for the cross-Channel assault, but each month the attack was delayed more landing craft left the shipyards for the training waters along the St Lawrence river.10

  The American military chiefs argued that more could have been done without the diversion of men and shipping to the Mediterranean, and this is no doubt the case. They deplored what one American general called a strategy of ‘scatterization’. They recognised sooner than Roosevelt that the Mediterranean campaign once begun would be difficult to scale down. Having reluctantly agreed the first step it became progressively more difficult for them to argue against the proposal to attack first Sicily, then the Italian peninsula. But the effect of each step was to make the invasion of northern Europe a more distant prospect. The most to which the British would agree, when the two sides met at Washington in May 1943 for another round of strategic argument, was to develop a plan for possible cross-Channel invasion in May 1944. It was not a firm commitment, and American chiefs continued to doubt British good faith, but it did allow them to set in motion at last large-scale programmes of training and production with an invasion in mind. Morgan was now given something to do with his planning staff in London.

  Over the summer months they laboured away, exploring the operational options. This generated heat as well as light. The two invasion sites chosen as the most likely to yield solid results were the Pas de Calais, the closest area to England, with the wide flat plain behind it pointed toward Germany’s heartland, and the area from the mouth of the Seine to the Cotentin peninsula in Normandy. The second of these had a number of advantages: it provided some natural shelter from the Channel weather and tides; it was less well defended than the Calais region; and it contained the valuable port of Cherbourg, which was larger than the northern Channel ports. To Morgan’s surprise his staff divided in fierce defence of the two options. He himself was not sure that the operation was feasible at all, whichever option was chosen. The argument broke down along national lines again. American planners favoured Normandy; British planners favoured Calais. The threatened stalemate was broken only by the intervention of Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of British Combined Operations. He invited Morgan’s staff to his headquarters at Largs in Scotland. There, in two days of bitter wrangling, the invasion strategy took shape. The outcome was victory for the American view. When Morgan prepared the final version of the invasion plan to present to the next Anglo-American summit in Quebec in August it was based on a narrow assault on Normandy with three divisions in May of 1944.11 Beyond this nothing was yet decided. America might have won a battle with its ally, but it had not yet won the war.

  It had taken more than a year for invasion even to reach the planning stage. To Soviet leaders western hesitancy was viewed with deep suspicion. When Stalin was told in June 1943 that no invasion was possible that year he warned Roosevelt of the ‘negative impression’ the statement would make on Soviet opinion and he refused to entertain excuses.12 What Stalin could not see was that the failure to invade came not from cowardice or bad faith, as he believed, but was the offspring of a sharp difference in strategic outlook between his two Allies. The contrast was in part a product of differing experience. For two years British forces in Europe had faced one defeat after another. They had been forcibly expelled from Norway, from France and then from Greece. These experiences bred an understandable caution. British leaders wanted to run no risks of further defeat. If an invasion were bloodily repulsed the effect on opinion at home and abroad might be disastrous; defeat would certainly jeopardise prospects for any second attempt. The circumstance of America’s entry into the war raised quite different expectations. There was no humiliating retreat to redeem. American opinion stood six-guns blazing, eager for combat. American military leaders reacted with an instinctive belligerency. The contrast, according to Roosevelt’s Secretary for War, Henry Stimson, was between a ‘fatigued and defeatist government’ on the one hand and ‘a young and vigorous nation’ on the other.13

  The differences ran deeper than this, At stake were two ways of warfare that were difficult to reconcile. British preference was for war on the periphery, using naval power to develop a flexible and opportunistic strategy, as they had done in the wars against Napoleon. With a relatively weak army and limited economic resources, short winnable campaigns against light enemy forces made greater strategic sense. Britain hoped that Germany would be worn down by losses sustained elsewhere, so that British forces would never have to face the full weight of the German army on land. The watchwords were attrition and dispersion, ‘scatterization’.14 The American traditions were those of the Civil War, of Ulysses Grant and the massive rolling front. American soldiers looked for the main enemy force in order to concentrate all efforts upon its comprehensive destruction. This could be achieved, they believed, only by ceaseless and vigorous action by powerfully armed formations driving the enemy to a standstill: the bludgeon rather than the rapier. They found little merit in dividing forces unnecessarily. Where the British saw calculated attrition, American soldiers saw action that was piecemeal and indecisive. British arguments for a Mediterranean strategy reflected British priorities; cross-Channel invasion was the American way, and America had the resources to invade not once but, if necessary, twice.15

  By the autumn of 1943 the whole issue of invasion still hung uncertainly in the air. The two allies had agreed to meet at Quebec in the middle of August to thrash out once again the direction of Allied strategy. The American delegation travelled to Canada determined to force a showdown. A few days before, Henry Stimson called on Roosevelt to present a letter in which he laid out the issue. The British could not be trusted to direct the invasion, he argued, for ‘their hearts are not in it’. Instead America should assume strategic leadership; the Supreme Commander should be an American; and the British should be told that ‘pinprick warfare’ did not work and be made to accept the big battle.16 Roosevelt agreed with it all. At Quebec the British delegates found their opponent more determined and better informed. The two sides sat down for their discussion almost literally face to face across an unusually narrow table. As the Americans expected, their ally tried to water down commitments to invasion. After three days of argument the British accepted the principle of a cross-Channel invasion, Operation Overlord, based on Morgan’s final plan. But they refused to allow the words ‘overriding priority’ to be applied to the allocation of men and material to the campaign, preferring to use the more modest term ‘main object’
. They also insisted that invasion should only go ahead under certain important conditions: the German fighter force should be much reduced in strength first, and there should be no more than twelve German divisions in reserve to oppose the attacking force, Since they had won the main commitment, the American negotiators gave way on the rest. The British accepted Overlord with deep reservations, but they saw the conditions they had imposed as a final defensive line against excessive risk.17

  No sooner had the ink dried on the Quebec agreements than the British negotiators began to chip away at the idea of Overlord. In private the British deplored the enterprise. Churchill cursed ‘this bloody second front!’; ‘all this “Overlord” folly must be thrown “Overboard”,’ wrote Alexander Cadogan, head of the British Foreign Ministry, in his diary when bad news came from Italy in October. Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, told the British Chiefs-of-Staff in November that they should not regard Overlord as ‘the pivot of our whole strategy’. Not for nothing did Stimson suspect that the British even after Quebec wanted nothing more than ‘to stick a knife into the back of Overlord’.18 Though British leaders could not openly flout publicly agreed strategy, they did everything they could to suggest other courses of action that could only have the effect of inhibiting plans for invasion. By October Churchill was once more all for planning adventures elsewhere, in the Balkans, in Yugoslavia, in Italy. By November, with the Allies bogged down on the Italian front, and little sign of German weakening elsewhere, the British began to argue that the putative conditions laid down at Quebec in August might not be met after all.