A World at Arms (116 page)

Certainly not only strategic issues led to arguments between the Western Allies. The American and British had very different views on economic and colonial policy. All during the war, the United States government was pressuring the British to remove the special imperial preferences which had been adopted during the Depression and which were seen by the Americans, especially Secretary of State Cordell Hull, as interfering with world trade in general and American trade in particular.
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The other major field of contention grew out of the American anti-colonialist tradition. Beginning in the winter of 1941–42, the obvious objection of Americans to colonialism caused serious problems for the alliance. This especially focused on the issue of India. In addition, there was President Roosevelt’s concern over the impact on domestic support for the war effort if the United States were not seen as pushing for the
end of colonialism.
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The British, on the other hand, and Churchill in particular, were insistent on not becoming involved in discussions about the future of the empire, which was dear to the Prime Minister’s heart and most certainly not to be discussed with the Americans of all people. Even in the worst days of the war there had been a reluctance to run risks in this field.
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Now that the tide appeared to be shifting, the British were even less willing to contemplate alterations in colonial policy to please either nationalists in the empire or the Americans. The suspicion of the Americans that it was British imperial interest which lay behind London’s and especially Churchill’s insistence on extensive operations in the Mediterranean greatly exacerbated the argument over strategy.

That argument had been papered over in the summer of 1942 with the decision to invade Northwest Africa. It had been dealt with but not resolved at Casablanca; the Germans having won the race for Tunisia in November 1942, it was obvious by January 1943 that an invasion of northern France in the summer of 1943 was practically impossible. But the Americans never developed any great enthusiasm for Mediterranean operations, and whatever was done there always looked to them like a diversion from the main effort.
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The British, on the other hand, thought that the opportunities in the Mediterranean should be exploited to the full. As will become increasingly obvious, Churchill would time and again display a preference for operations in the Mediterranean in practice over his own belief in principle in the attack across the Channel. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Brooke, kept arguing for Mediterranean operations, and especially a landing in Italy, because he believed that it would be more difficult for the Germans to reinforce there than in France, a belief he held sincerely, though it would be disproved by the experience of landings in July and September 1943 and January 1944-but without ever making any difference in his assessment. Marshall, on the other hand, had objected to the Northwest Africa operation from the start, argued that it would function like a suction pump to draw more resources, and that it was certain to end up interfering with rather than supporting the great invasion, which alone could bring the military power of the Western Allies to bear directly on the Germans. The argument continued for years during the war-and enlivened post-war debates. Ironically, as we shall see, on the one Mediterranean operation that Marshall (like Eisenhower) wanted, the invasion of southern France, it would be the British who would balk. While a series of compromises and agreed strategies was eventually worked out,
the arguments left behind an endless trail of nasty comments about Marshall in Brooke’s diary.
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The most immediate practical issue in the planning of Britain and the United States early in 1943, other than the Battle of the Atlantic, was the forthcoming invasion of Sicily.
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Because of their inability to relieve pressure on the Soviet Union during the anticipated new German summer offensive by a landing on the Channel coast, the Western Allies were especially eager to launch this operation as early in the year as possible. While the battle in Tunisia was in progress, fixed dates were still argued about, with both Churchill and Roosevelt hopeful that the preliminary estimate of the planners that the landing would have to come in August could be moved forward. Although they pushed for June, the final date was set for early July, an interval of less than two months following the end of the Tunisian campaign.

The initial invasion plan provided for two armies, one British and one American, landing at opposite ends of the island, the British in the southeast and the Americans in the northwest. At the insistence of Montgomery, who was to command the British 8th Army portion of the invasion, this plan was altered to have both armies in the southeast, with the American 7th Army under Patton on the left flank. This change, together with several less spectacular but still significant alterations, was made after considerable and at times heated debate; but Montgomery’s insistence that he command the whole operation himself was rejected. The Army Group would be under Alexander, who in turn would be under Eisenhower’s Allied theater command. In view of Montgomery’s near incapacity for dealing with Americans, this was undoubtedly an essential arrangement, but it only exacerbated his negative attitude toward the American army and would have serious repercussions in and after the campaign.
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SICILY AND THE ITALIAN SURRENDER

The planned landing on Sicily would be the first in Europe since the British had been driven out of Greece and Crete in 1941 and it had to be launched not against Vichy French forces as in Northwest Africa but against Italian and German troops on Italian territory. Furthermore, the Allies did not have the benefit of the sort of intelligence which had facilitated the operation in Africa. There, Allied intelligence had excellent sources in the French areas and could decypher a high proportion of the German and Italian radio signals traffic to their forces in North Africa. On Sicily and the Italian mainland, however, the Allies lacked agents in place while the Axis headquarters relied heavily on cable traffic
which, unlike radio messages, could not be intercepted and decoded. Only the German air force continued to use radio communication extensively, thereby unwittingly providing the Allies with much useful information.

To confuse the Axis and lead them to disperse their forces, Allied intelligence mounted a major series of deception operations designed to give the impression that landings were planned on Sardinia (as was in fact considered for a while) and in Greece. The most famous of these projects, that of the “Man Who Never Was,”
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relied on the pro-Axis sympathies of Franco Spain to pass on to the Germans especially forged documents planted on a corpse floated ashore on the Spanish coast.

These schemes did help confuse the Germans about the intended landing and directed some Axis resources elsewhere. The advantage gained was, however, partially cancelled out by horrendous errors made as a result of lack of proper training and coordination between the Allied air and naval commanders, in the handling of the airborne assaults which were to assist both the British and the American landing units move inland rapidly by seizing key positions beyond the beaches. Improperly routed over the badly instructed landing armada, the airborne forces suffered as much from Allied as from Axis fire and therefore could provide only some of the assistance to a rapid advance inland that had been expected of them.
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The landings on July 10, 1943 did succeed.
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The defenders were surprised in spite of the enormous size of the armada carrying the British and American assault divisions.
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The British forces quickly captured the great port of Syracuse intact, as well as some airfields which would help the Allied air forces in providing close ground support. However, just as the advancing British forces on the eastern coast began to run into coordinated German resistance, Montgomery, whose exuberance ran away with his usual caution, split his forces. Taking over the road north which would have enabled the Americans to move inland, he sent one corps up each of the two flanks of his eastern Sicily landing area. The result was that everything went wrong. The 8th Army coastal thrust–which might have punched through toward Messina and thereby cut off the Axis forces in Sicily entirely–was now too weak and soon stalled in the Catania plain. The 8th Army’s inland thrust on the road originally assigned to the Americans moved forward slowly but to no great effect. The Americans had successfully warded off a fierce German
counter-attack at the Gela beaches, in part because of excellent naval gunfire support; they were now shifted toward the northwest, raced for Palermo–which was a spectacular but by then unprofitable prize–and then had to be completely redirected to the east toward Messina.
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The upshot of this was that the Allies ground their way forward, captured many Italian soldiers, but pushed the Germans off the island rather than destroying them. In a final souring of the campaign, the Allied air force and navy, in spite of overwhelming superiority, could not prevent the Germans from evacuating the bulk of their forces across the Straits of Messina.
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The Western Allies had indeed won a local victory; their land forces in particular had fought well and hard, with the British 8th Army (now including a Canadian division) showing successful adjustment from desert warfare to a new kind of terrain, while the American soldiers demonstrated their absorption of the lessons learned in Tunisia. But the higher Allied commanders hardly covered themselves with glory. Eisenhower and Alexander had not controlled their subordinates effectively. Montgomery had miscalculated the situation and lost the great chance at the beginning–greatly antagonizing the Americans in the process–while Patton had disgraced himself, and narrowly avoided dismissal, by the notorious incidents of slapping and cursing some soldiers in two field hospitals.
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Only General Omar Bradley had distinguished himself as an effective corps commander and moved up to higher command as a result.

If in these Ways the aura of success which attended the conquest of Sicily had a side to it that was by no means all positive, in other ways “Husky” did make several major contributions to the war. By far the most important was its impact on the German direction of the war: coming just as the Battle of Kursk had turned critical, the Allied landing in Sicily would, as will be discussed in that context, contribute to the German decision to end all offensive operations on the Eastern Front so that reinforcements of both troops and planes could be sent to Italy and the Balkans. This was critically related to an aspect of “Husky” which became immediately obvious to the Germans: the Italians were simply not prepared and willing to fight Britain and the United States effectively in defense of their homeland. The Germans would have to send additional troops not only into Italy if they expected to hold any portion of it against the Allies but also into those portions of the Balkans garrisoned by Italian troops and hence, it was now obvious, likely to be open to practically unopposed landings.

These German concerns were reinforced by the impact of the Allied advance in Sicily and the bombing of Italian cities on the internal cohesion of Italy. The reports Berlin was getting from Rome were in many
ways confusing, but it was obvious that Mussolini’s regime, already hard hit by the loss of the African empire, was now even more shaky as Italian home territory was coming under attack. In 1917, the victory of the Central Powers over the Italians at Caporetto had brought about a certain rallying of Italian popular support for the defense of a country clearly in imminent danger of conquest by German and Austrian troops. The picture of civilians in Palermo waving white flags, if not actually cheering American GIs, showed that the attitude of the people this time was very different indeed. Even before Mussolini was toppled from power by his own former friends and associates in the Fascist Grand Council, the Germans were planning to take over control of Italy and Italian-occupied territory in France, Yugoslavia, Greece and Albania.
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In the weeks between the collapse of Axis resistance in Tunisia and the landing in Sicily, the Germans had begun moving troops, primarily from their armies in France, into Italy, whether or not the Italian government wanted them. While Mussolini hoped to preserve the appearance of independence at least in his own country, his military leaders realized that the disastrous defeats their army had suffered in North Africa and on the Eastern Front meant that, whatever their preference for holding the reins in their own country, only German troops could make a defense of any portion of Italy effective. This divergence of view naturally made it easier for the Germans to send in to Italy whatever they felt they could spare elsewhere. There was, however, no effective coordination of German and Italian preparations, and the German commanders in the area, especially Field Marshal Kesselring, were excessively optimistic.
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An air force commander himself, Kesselring had originally been sent to the Mediterranean precisely to gain control of the air over the Central Mediterranean; he now presided over an air contingent which in spite of a steady flow of reinforcements was dwindling under the hammering of Allied air power and could not meet the constant requests of the Italians for more planes and additional anti-aircraft protection.
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Symbolic for the changing situation in the air war in the Central Mediterranean was the surrender on June 11, 1943, of the island of Pantelleria at the end of heavy air and sea bombardment and before the Allied landing force came ashore.

Right after the Axis collapse in Tunisia, Hitler had ordered the creation of a special staff to prepare measures in case Italy caved in or changed sides.
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Since Rommel had been recalled from North Africa in part at the insistence of the Italians, he was a logical person to head the preparations, code-named first “Alarich” (and later “Achse” [Axis]), to take over the Italian zones in France and the Balkans, secure the Alpine passes on the French-Italian and German-Italian border, and control
as much of Italy itself as possible. German units originally scheduled to invade Spain and Portugal in case of an Allied landing in the Iberian peninsula were now assigned to the new project, while it was incorrectly anticipated that three SS divisions could be removed from the Eastern Front. In practice, the spring 1943 German postponements of the offensive against Kursk and the Allied landing in Sicily altered the details of the German plans–and Rommel himself was briefly transferred to Salonika on July 21 -but they had at least begun serious planning to cope with the defection of Italy.
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The Italians, on the other hand, would botch their intended exit from the war about as dramatically as Mussolini had miscalculated the country’s entrance into it.