A World at Arms (120 page)

The Americans were now advocating implementation of a plan drawn up by an Allied staff headed for the time being by a British general, based on actual Allied combat experience and anticipated available resources, and put forward at a time when the campaign in Sicily was nearing its end, when there were soundings about a surrender from the Italians, and, above all, at a time in the war when the Battle of the Atlantic, though still raging fiercely and likely to provide much hard fighting, was clearly turning in favor of the Allies. In this context, an invasion of Northwest Europe was obviously a realistic proposal, not a pipe-dream.

At the conference in Quebec, the American and British political and military leaders argued out their views of the future of the war with considerable heat, but ended in a substantial measure of agreement.
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The “overriding priority” which the Americans wanted for “Overlord” was not attained, but the final language made success of “Overlord” the “main object” for 1944. The Americans received the reluctant assent of the British to a reaffirmation of the transfer of seven divisions from the Mediterranean to the United Kingdom for “Overlord.” This was a key point, because with forces reduced by such a transfer the Mediterranean theater commander clearly could not be expected to engage in any great array of new operations, however promising in the eyes of the British and however peripheral and diversionary in the eyes of the Americans.

Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that there was agreement that there would be no offensive operations in the Balkans. Guerilla movements in that area would be supplied by air and sea, there might be minor commando raids, and the strategic bombing offensive would attack objectives in Southeast Europe, but there was to be no commitment of ground troops. When, soon after, the British tried to seize the Italian islands in the Aegean and then, as the Italians would not fight the Germans there any more than anywhere else, urged the United States to support operations against Rhodes to assist their own units landed on Cos, Leros and Samos, the Americans absolutely refused. The British suffered disaster in the Aegean in October 1943, losing heavily in ships and planes as well as men. This caused considerable hard feelings between the Western Allies, but the Americans were under no circumstances going to be rushed into major allocations of resources in the Eastern Mediterranean, where they were then in the process of trying to
reduce
American forces and supply commitments.
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Agreement was also reached at Quebec on two other issues of importance for the future of the war. For the European theater, the COSSAC staff of General Morgan had produced a plan, code-named “Rankin,”
for a quick entry into Europe by British and United States forces in case of a sudden German collapse, a contingency examined earlier but now more in need of study because of recent developments in Italy-which might be repeated in Germany–and because of the interest of President Roosevelt in getting troops from the West to Berlin as soon as the Russians reached it from the East, a subject to which he would return later that year.
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The various alternative versions of the “Rankin” plan attuned to differing contingencies were approved. The other area of major discussion was the war against Japan. The outlines of this issue are reviewed in the examination of the Pacific theater subsequently in this chapter, but in the context of frictions between the United States and Britain resolved at Quebec, a word must be said about the settlement at this time of one of the most difficult controversies ever to arise between the two powers during the war.

The complicated command arrangements in Southeast Asia seemed to both powers to require a supreme commander who could perhaps pull together the disparate Allied forces engaged in the theater, possibly the way Eisenhower was successfully beginning to do in the Mediterranean. The Americans also hoped–perhaps the appropriate term is that they would have turned their prayer wheels if they had had any–that such an appointment would at least and at last reduce the torpor which characterized the British forces in the India-Burma area. The British government, however, came up with the name of Air Chief Marshal Sir Sholto Douglas, the air commander in the Middle East, whom the Americans absolutely refused to accept. Over a two-month period this dispute, the most difficult such controversy of the war, raged. Churchill would not accept any of the alternative British commanders suggested, and Roosevelt, clearly backing Marshall on this, stuck to his objections to Douglas.
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At the Quebec Conference, Churchill at last came up with another name: the British Chief of Combined Operations, Lord Louis Mountbatten.
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Immediately and enthusiastically accepted by the Americans, Mountbatten would go on not only to awaken the sleepy British commands as the Americans had hoped, and enthuse the British soldiers, as Montgomery had done in North Africa, but play a role which perhaps predestined him to become the last Viceroy of India, hardly what Churchill had in mind. But the divisive issue of command was settled; whatever the subsequent endless troubles in the officially designated SEAC, South East Asia Command, Mountbatten had the ability to keep on at least reasonable terms with the perpetually feuding British, American and Chinese commanders on the scene. Marshall was so relieved to have this issue settled that he agreed to the appointment of
a personal representative of Churchill to General MacArthur’s staff, an opportunity which Churchill made golden by appointing Lt. General Sir Herbert Lumsden, former commander of an armored corps in North Africa, who turned out to have excellent rapport with MacArthur.
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Here was an ironic but fitting outcome of a quarrel over appointments that at one point had been getting out of hand.

On two further issues relating to the European war there was essentially no difficulty in reaching agreement at Quebec. As a remote contingency if the “Overlord” operation could not be launched, plans should be kept up to date for “Jupiter,” the older project, long a favorite of Churchill’s, for an Allied landing in Norway. More significant was the sense that the Combined Bomber Offensive against Germany was beginning to hit its stride and could perform a major role in diverting German air power from the Eastern Front, disrupting her production and morale, and preparing the way for the great invasion in 1944. The imminent surrender of Italy opened up the possibility, already mentioned, of seizing airfields from which British and United States airplanes could reach important targets in east Germany and in portions of German-controlled Europe hitherto out of range, and thus forcing a diversion of German air defenses.

THE AIR WAR IN 1943

Even before the Quadrant Conference, the British with United States Air Force help had carried out a series of great air attacks on the city of Hamburg on July 24–27.
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Enormous damage and heavy casualties (about 40,000 deaths) were inflicted in a succession of raids, which overwhelmed the defenses by sheer numbers, as well as the use of a new device to confuse German radar code-named “Window,” the dropping of great quantities of aluminum strips. Vast fires, which produced a massive fire-storm, gutted big portions of Germany’s second largest city. This phenomenon, new in modern warfare, created a self-nourishing fire which sucked in people and objects, raised temperatures to levels that caused the asphalt in the streets to burn, and could not be contained or even substantially affected by traditional fire–fighting techniques. The devastation was vast, but with no understanding of German reconstruction efforts, the huge attack on Hamburg would not be repeated on any comparable scale.

After the area raid on Hamburg, the Royal Air Force proceeded to carry out massive attacks on other German cities in September and October 1943, especially Mannheim-Ludwigshafen, Frankfürt am
Main, and Hanover; the raid on Kassel on October 22 created a fire–storm like the one in Hamburg.
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Believing that heavy bombers acting alone could win the war, Harris now sent his planes on the long and exceedingly dangerous route to Berlin. Here too there was massive damage and great loss of life, but the distance from British bases, more effective German defenses, and difficulty in concentration when attacking a vast built up area attenuated the impact. Without making a judgement on the controversy between those who consider the Battle of Berlin a success or a failure for the Royal Air Force, certain things are clear.
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However much the attacks on urban areas diverted from the priority in the “Pointblank” directive for the Combined Bomber Offensive on aircraft factories, they certainly forced a major diversion of German military effort and resources. The August 18, 1943, suicide of the German air force chief of Staff, General Jeschonnek, was only the most obvious sign of the enormous strain and drain imposed by the assault at home simultaneously with the great summer struggle on the Eastern Front.
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The general disruption of the German economy and the specific raid on the research station at Peenemünde on August 17, 1943, meant that the most dangerous of Germany’s new weapons, the’ ballistic rocket V-2, which was originally to have been fired in masses on London and other cities from November 1, 1943, did not come into action until September 8, 1944, a very significant difference.
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Furthermore, the very heavy losses of the Luftwaffe, especially in the fighter forces struggling to defend industry and cities, led to a massive reallocation not only of production resources to fighters and anti-aircraft guns but from the Eastern and Mediterranean fronts to the defense of the skies over Germany. With occasional exceptions, the mass of German air power was concentrated on the home front from the fall of 1943 on.
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There the increase of aircraft production could not keep up with attrition in the sky, and diversions of resources to the elaborate new weapons hindered rather than helped an air force struggling to cope with streams of Allied bombers. Moreover, the steady increase in anti-aircraft guns with their enormous consumption of ammunition dramatically reduced what was available to the army on the land fronts.
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The situation had not yet reached the point it did in 1944 when half of Germany’s artillery was at home pointing skyward, but the omens were there.

On the other hand, massive increases in German fighter production did make both British night–time and American daylight bomber raids
increasingly costly. Larger losses of the four–engine bombers meant heavy casualties among trained crews as the Germans now enjoyed the advantage that the British had held in the Battle of Britain: larger crews in the bombers than in the fighters and a total loss to death or imprisonment of the crew of each bomber shot down, as compared to the possible return to duty of any fighter pilots who bailed out. In the battle over German cities and factories in the fall of 1943 it looked more and more as if the Germans would win out. More especially, the steadily high losses of Bomber Command and such heavy losses by the United States air force as those sustained in the attack on the ball–bearing plants at Schweinfurt on August 17 suggested that the massive fighter production program pushed by Speer and Field Marshal Erhard Milch would triumph over the Combined Bomber Offensive, especially in the absence of long-range fighter escorts.
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The Germans were so confident that they were winning in the skies over German-controlled Europe that they again accentuated plans and production projects for bombers, not fighters, in order to strike more heavily at Great Britain.
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But even before the last big British defeat and German victory in the air during the raid on Niirnberg on March 30, 1944, the Americans had found the answer to the Luftwaffe’s challenge in the skies.
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In the meantime, the British and United States bomber crews fought it out in the skies over Europe in battles in one way similar to those of the German submarines in the Atlantic–steady determination in the face of very low odds on survival. These were lowest for the Americans in the August 1, 1943, raid from North Africa on the Romanian oil fields at Ploesti. As often before and after, considerable damage was inflicted at great cost, but the failure to recognize the need for repeat attacks–and sometimes the inability to mount such attacks because of losses–meant that, within a relatively short time, critical damage to factories could be repaired.
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The Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Force would have to shift their bombing attacks to areas they could reach with fighter escorts until the fighter escorts could be altered to reach the targets that the bombing forces were supposed to reach. In the meantime, the Combined Bombing Offensive had made a major contribution to the Allied war effort by imposing a terrible rate of attrition on the German air force, by forcing its re–allocation from the land fronts in east and south to home defense, by making the Germans disperse their aircraft industry and thereby reducing its output, by inflicting substantial damage on some industries and more
cities, and by inspiring the Germans to direct resources to several ingenious but not especially cost–effective devices for retaliating against Britain.

MOSCOW, CAIRO, TEHERAN

The continued Combined Bombing Offensive was the most obvious and immediately implemented of the Quadrant decisions.
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The invasion of Italy in early September showed that the Western Allies would not be idle after the conquest of Sicily. But the major issue to be worked out remained coordination of the British and American effort with that of the Soviet Union in the war still to be won–and in the years thereafter–now that it looked increasingly as if the Allies could expect to move to the offensive. The Soviet Union had refused to be represented at Casablanca and had been uninterested in participating at the Trident Conference in Washington in Mayor the Quadrant meeting in Quebec in August; on the contrary Stalin had warded off all British and American attempts to arrange a meeting of the three powers at the highest level and had gone beyond this by withdrawing ambassadors from Washington and London. In the summer of 1943, exchanges between Moscow and the two Western capitals had grown increasingly acerbic. There was now something of a thaw. Until Soviet records on these matters (if they exist) become accessible, it will remain impossible to be certain; but the failure of the Germans to respond to any Soviet overtures, the obvious disinclination of the German generals to overthrow the Hitler regime, and the growing confidence of the Soviet Union in its own military abilities probably contributed as much to this change as the steady increase in Allied aid shipments, the fighting around the Mediterranean and in the skies over Europe and the urgings of the American government. Stalin now agreed to a meeting of the big three to be held later that year and a preparatory meeting with high-ranking British and American officials to prepare the way. Stalin’s August 8 statement that a big three meeting was desirable later that year could be recalled as easily as his earlier tentative agreement to meet with Franklin D. Roosevelt in July or August 1943, but the response of Churchill and Roosevelt from Quebec on August 18, agreeing to Stalin’s proposal for a preliminary meeting of responsible representatives to prepare the ground for the big meeting later, opened the way for new steps.