A World at Arms (71 page)

There was agreement that assisting Russia, which was carrying the main burden of the fight against Germany, was essential. There was also temporary agreement on a project to seize French Northwest Africa by a small expedition, a project that vanished quickly as the Allied rout in East Asia and the great increase in sinkings in the Atlantic
¹²⁴
ruled out any such offensive operations in the spring of 1942. The greater issue then and subsequently was the basic one of direction and priorities in the assault on Germany. The earliest British plans for the defeat of Germany, already touched on in
Chapter 3
, contemplated a return to the continent as Germany collapsed under the weight of bombing attacks, exhaustion from blockade, and uprisings in the occupied areas. Such projects did anticipate a landing in Northwest Europe and always assumed that Antwerp, the great Belgian port, would be the main base for an assault on the Ruhr area, Germany’s industrial heart.
¹²⁵
These projects, however, looked to a distant future, assumed that German resistance would be near an end
before
the landing, and that the landing itself would be preceded by a long series of operations on the periphery.
Not only Soviet calls for actions that would directly and more dramatically relieve pressure on the Eastern Front, but a fundamentally different American approach called this concept into question.

The Americans argued that the way to defeat Germany was to concentrate the largest possible force as early as possible in England and strike across the Channel at the main German forces, the assumption being that such an invasion would bring about rather than follow upon the end of German resistance; and that its being prepared would tie down German forces in the West even before any landing took place. Operations on the periphery would have the effect not, as the British thought, of weakening Germany but of diverting Allied strength and, in particular, frittering away the scarce shipping resources in support of campaigns at a greater rather than a lesser distance from the major industrial and manpower base in the United States.
¹²⁶
The shortest route looked best to the Americans, while the British, who had been kicked off the continent three times already by the Germans, wanted to take advantage of the naval superiority of the Western Allies to wear down the Germans at points where the Germans would be in a difficult position to bring their great land and air power to bear.

Furthermore, the British were very skeptical of American military abilities, and the Americans had their doubts about the British. Practically none of the American commanders had had any experience in the direction of large-scale military operations and their armies were only just beginning to be organized. The idea of a massive assault on Northwest Europe by as yet non-existing American units, which in practice would mean a landing by British units against whom the Germans could readily throw overwhelming force, made no sense to the British military and political leaders; and as the American forces did begin to build up, their likely performance in battle as well as the ability of their leaders looked doubtful to those in London. A disaster in Northwest Europe would not only be of no help to the Russians, it would be positively dangerous for them by enabling the Germans to concentrate on the Eastern Front for a long time, secure in the knowledge that no new operation could be launched against them in the West for months if not years. Furthermore, the strained resources of the British Isles might not be adequate for a renewed attempt; a second Dunkirk could presage utter disaster, not recovery. Operations in the Mediterranean, on the other hand, would have a real impact on the Germans by depriving them of their Italian ally, forcing them to increase garrisons in Southern Europe in addition to those already immobilized by occupation duties and the threat of invasion in the West and in Norway, and greatly reduce the effectiveness of the German campaign against Allied shipping by
substituting the short Mediterranean supply route for the long route around the Cape of Good Hope.

If there were British doubts about the Americans, the latter had grave reservations about both British performance and policy. Though admiring British courage and determination, the Americans were impressed only by their performance in the air and on the seas. The steady series of defeats suffered by the United Kingdom in the war was not likely to impress Americans with British leadership abilities; and it is essential to remember that, although people were too polite to mention it, the string of disasters continued after American entrance into the war. The defeat of the British in Malaya culminating in a quick surrender there would be followed a few months later by the terrible defeats in North Africa and the surrender of Tobruk.
¹²⁷
If, two years after being chased off the continent by the Germans, the British referred to themselves as an “amateur army fighting professionals,”
¹²⁸
there was perhaps less reason to listen to them than both British leaders at the time and historians afterwards assumed. The Americans not only believed that British interest in the Mediterranean was governed more by imperial concerns than by sound military strategy, they did not believe that the operations there were handled with great competence.
¹²⁹
There were good reasons to send assistance because a complete German victory in North Africa would threaten Russia’s southern flank and open the possibility of a German-Japanese junction in the Indian Ocean, but there was general agreement among American military and political leaders, especially President Roosevelt, Secretary of War Stimson, and General Marshall, that a major United States commitment in the Mediterranean would divert resources away from the primary theater and produce an endless series of minor operations with little hope of crushing Germany.
¹³⁰

In the British-American discussions of spring 1942 there was, or at least appeared to be, an evolving consensus that some action needed to be, could be, and would be undertaken in Western Europe in 1942. It has sometimes been suggested that British agreement to American pressure on this issue was merely a pretense designed to preclude a switch of American priority from Europe to the Pacific theater. It must be noted however, that in the very months that the British were actually urging the United States to send troops to the Pacific for the defense of Australia while both countries were committed to the buildup in England for an invasion of Europe code-named “Bolero,” internal British documents repeatedly stressed the intention of landing in Europe in 1942 and seizing and holding a bridge – head on the continent that would draw German forces from Eastern Europe (at least air if not land units) and provide the basis for a further advance on land in 1943.
¹³¹

In April 1942 when American military leaders went to England for critical conferences on strategy, determined to get agreement on their preference for a landing in 1942, there was, therefore, a tentative agreement for the buildup in England to make possible a landing later that year, in which the British would play the major initial role with American participation steadily increasing.
¹³²
But there was not only residual doubt among some of the British participants to these discussions, there were emerging insurmountable practical difficulties. Before these became sufficiently obvious to alter Allied plans, Soviet Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov had visited London and Washington where agreement was reached on a phraseology that could be interpreted as promising an invasion in the West in 1942. The actual text was that “full understanding was reached with regard to the urgent tasks of creating a Second Front in Europe in 1942,”
¹³³
a phraseology obviously not as precise as it sounds on first reading, but it does reflect the hopes in Washington in late May 1942 before the disaster in North Africa.
¹³⁴
Even before that defeat turned around the situation, the Western Allies were increasingly affected not only by dangers in East Asia which were obviously greater than they had anticipated, but by the catastrophic shipping situation which was being dramatically worsened by the enormous loss of ships to German submarines off the North American coast in the first half of 1942. This subject is examined in more detail in the next chapter, but its effect on Allied strategy in 1942 was to be dramatic: it helped preclude any invasion of Western Europe in 1942, it limited very dramatically any operation in 1942 and 1943 at all (and would thus keep the North African invasion from being mounted on a scale that could have assured a rapid seizure of Tunisia), and it would require that any operation in 1942 temporarily preclude the use of shipping for the dangerous route around northern Norway to the Soviet Arctic ports of Murmansk and Archangel.

It was into this already difficult situation that the great British defeat of late May-early June 1942 burst with shocking impact. By a coincidence, Churchill was himself in Washington for strategy talks when the terrible news of Tobruk’s surrender was handed to him.
¹³⁵
Obviously dramatic steps had to be taken to prevent a collapse of the whole situation in the Middle East. The Americans agreed to strip their new armored division of its Sherman tanks and send them to Egypt; it was the first installment of these that arrived in Egypt during the Alam el Haifa battle that has already been mentioned, and the arrival of the rest was critical to Montgomery’s timing of and victory in the great battle of El Alamein in late October, 1942.

But not only armor to replace most of the 8th Army’s lost and obsolete
tanks with better ones had to be sent. Concerned about the great danger of a complete Axis triumph in the Middle East that would enable the Germans and Japanese to cut the Allied supply route across Iran to Russia and across India to China, the Americans ordered the new bomber force being built up in India under General Lewis Brereton to be shifted to the Egyptian front.
¹³⁶
This shift in turn had two major implications for the war. In the first place, it put American combat units into the Middle East theater for the first time (the tanks having been shipped without their crews). From now on, an American air force would play its part in the Eastern Mediterranean theater, first contributing to the defense of Egypt and later engaging in such operations as the air raids on the Romanian oil fields. The other side of this transfer was, of course, its effect on the China-Burma-India theater. The promised air reinforcement for Chiang Kai-shek had vanished to another theater, and with it a great part of American influence with Chiang in military affairs, a point of great significance for subsequent United States-Chinese relations in the war.
¹³⁷
The Americans decided not to send other units to the Middle East, but their confidence in the British – after the earlier disasters – was badly shaken, and they were much less inclined to push their ally in the subsequent talks on strategy for 1942.

Before those talks are discussed, one last repercussion of the summer crisis in Egypt must be mentioned. As agreed upon the year before, the Russians were releasing Polish prisoners of war and civilians deported into Central Asia for the creation of a Polish army under the auspices of the Polish government-in-exile. It had been Sikorski’s hope that this army would fight alongside the Red Army on the Eastern Front and eventually reenter Poland from the east (the way de Gaulle anticipated having his troops eventually return with the Western Allies into France). The building up of the Polish army inside the Soviet Union was, however, fraught with endless frictions and difficulties; and the Soviet government, which certainly did not want either a truly independent Polish army in the east or a German army striking at the Soviet Union across the Middle East from the south, decided that the best way to deal with both issues was to send the Poles out in the summer of 1942 to reinforce the British in Egypt. With very mixed feelings, the Poles as well as the British accepted this proposal and the newly forming Polish divisions, accompanied by thousands of civilians, headed for the North African front and would eventually reenter Europe from the south, not the east.
¹³⁸
By the time the resulting transfers had an impact on operations, new decisions made in London in July were being implemented in Africa.

Talks between the Western Allies took place in London in July, the
month after the British defeat in North Africa and even as Auchinleck was halting the Germans at the gateway to Alexandria but was unable to dislodge them. In anticipation of these meetings, both the Americans and the British reviewed their respective positions. All were concerned about the Russians holding on in the face of a new German offensive. The Americans were more determined than ever that a landing in Northwest Europe was essential; they had already decided to shore up the faltering British in the Middle East but they were gravely concerned about any diversion from the concentration on one main front. The fact that it had proved necessary to respond to the great victories of Japan by allocating greater forces to the Pacific made it clear to them, however, that the British would have to carry the main burden of any assault in Northwest Europe that year. And there were those among the Americans, especially Admiral King, who believed that the Pacific War should have greater priority in any case and most assuredly so if nothing were going to be done in Europe in 1942 anyway.
¹³⁹

The British, more cautious after the defeat in the desert than earlier, were now certain in their own minds that a cross-Channel assault in force was out of the question that year. Only Mountbatten and some on his Combined Operations staff thought that an attack on the Cherbourg peninsula could be mounted and a beachhead held in that portion of Normandy.
¹⁴⁰
Churchill and the three Chiefs of Staff were convinced that this was impossible and that a disaster in the West, quite possibly another disgraceful mass surrender on the model of Singapore and Tobruk, far from helping the Russians would end up by hurting them because of its subsequent relief for the Germans from any threat in the West for a very long time.
¹⁴¹
Furthermore, though on this point the evidence is circumstantial rather than direct, the possibility put forward by Mountbatten of holding a small beachhead looked like a very poor idea even if it were feasible because it would absorb endless resources without in any substantial way bringing about a weakening of the German army in the East. The basic position of the London authorities accordingly was that no offensive against Northwest Europe could or should be launched in 1942.
¹⁴²