Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (3 page)

Plan Orange was one of a series of so-called color plans whose origins reached back to the beginning of the century. They were contingency plans for possible conflicts against a whole variety of potential foes, some of them more likely than others. Besides Orange, which was the plan for war against Japan, there were plans for Germany (Black), England (Red), and Mexico (Green), plus many others. But it was Plan Orange that dominated the war-gaming exercises at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. There, on the giant checkerboard floor of Pringle Hall, officer-students maneuvered wooden models of battleships around to refight the World War I Battle of Jutland, and to imagine a similar confrontation against the Imperial Japanese Navy. Initially, at least, Plan Orange itself was relatively simple, if not simplistic. It posited an effort by Japan to seize the Philippines, which would trigger the mobilization of the American Pacific battle
fleet in Hawaiian waters followed by a campaign across the Central Pacific that would culminate in a Jutland-like showdown with the Japanese somewhere in the Philippine Sea. While the plan grew in sophistication as it underwent periodic review and adjustment, the central elements of it remained at the heart of U.S. Navy planning, and it informed both budget requests and the annual fleet exercises held each spring to test the fleet’s readiness.
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American planners began to reassess their assumptions as early as 1937. It was not because Japan seemed any less ambitious or dangerous; that very year, in fact, the Japanese invaded China to begin what they labeled “the China incident,” but which was in fact a full-scale war of conquest. Rather, it was because the complexity of the international environment suggested the wisdom of broadening America’s security outlook. To do that, Roosevelt sent Navy Captain Royal E. Ingersoll, head of the Navy’s War Plans Division, to London to conduct private exploratory talks with the British about how the two nations might coordinate their forces in the Pacific and elsewhere in the event of war. It was the first foot in the door of a transatlantic relationship that would develop dramatically over the next four years. Two years later, in 1939, the key assumptions of Plan Orange were openly challenged when a U.S. Army–Navy Joint Planning Committee noted that a successful defense of the Caribbean and the Panama Canal against Germany would require “offensive measures in the Atlantic,” and as a result, the U.S. Navy should adopt “a defensive attitude in the Eastern Pacific.” That fall, the U.S. Army–Navy Joint Board scripted a whole new array of plans that retained the color coding for potential foes but grouped them in such a way as to envision possible wars against two or more “colors” at the same time. Inevitably, perhaps, these were dubbed “rainbow” plans. Despite these straws in the wind, most U.S. Navy leaders resisted a reorientation of defense policy away from the Pacific. To the admirals, Japan remained the primary and most probable enemy, and the ghost of Plan Orange continued to influence both their thinking and their training.
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That began to change after Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, and especially after German forces sliced through Belgium and the Netherlands
in the spring of 1940, drove the British from the beaches at Dunkirk, and compelled the French to sue for peace. On June 22, 1940, the very day that French generals signed an armistice that acknowledged their defeat, Roosevelt met with the Army chief of staff, George C. Marshall, and the chief of naval operations, Harold R. Stark, to discuss how the French collapse might affect American security interests.

Both Marshall and Stark were destined to play key roles in the war to come. Marshall was a specialist in planning and training who had served on the staff of John “Black Jack” Pershing during the First World War and had helped orchestrate the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Promoted to the rank of brigadier general in 1936, he pinned on the four stars of a full general when Roosevelt chose him for chief of staff, a post he assumed, significantly, on September 1, 1939, the very day Germany invaded Poland. For all his administrative gifts and keen intelligence, Marshall’s greatest asset was his temperament. Quiet, dignified, and patient, he seldom raised his voice and never lost his temper. He was a superb judge of other men and kept a small notebook in which he listed the names of those officers who, in some future crisis, should be tapped for command responsibility.

Harold Raynsford Stark had taken up his duties as the eighth chief of naval operations a month earlier, on August 1, 1939. A 1903 graduate of the Naval Academy, he bore an unusual nickname. As a plebe (freshman) at the academy in 1899, he had been asked by an upperclassman if he was related to the American Revolutionary War general John Stark. The young plebe, no doubt standing at exaggerated attention, as befitted his status, confessed that he had never heard of General John Stark. At that, the upperclassman, with more forcefulness than accuracy, informed the young plebe that at the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Bennington in Vermont, John Stark had proclaimed, “We will win today or Betty Stark will be a widow!” It was a piece of American patriotic lore that the upperclassman thought every plebe should know, especially one named Stark. So he instructed the hapless plebe that from that moment on he was to shout out that phrase whenever he encountered a senior midshipman. It was not long before Stark became universally known as “Betty” at the academy, and Betty Stark he remained for the rest
of his life. Even as chief of naval operations, Stark signed his memos—including those to the president—simply as “Betty.”
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Both Marshall and Stark advised Roosevelt that if the Germans got control of the French navy, it would tip the balance of naval power in the Atlantic. In such a case, they suggested, the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, which Roosevelt had sent there to deter Japanese aggression in Asia, should be transferred to the Atlantic. Roosevelt agreed in principle, but he chose to wait until the status of the French navy was clarified. Some clarification came eleven days later when the Royal Navy took the matter in hand and executed a preemptive strike against the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir in Algiers, sinking a French battleship and heavily damaging six other ships, killing more than twelve hundred Frenchmen in the process. Consequently, though Roosevelt did send a battleship division as well as its two newest battleships to the Atlantic in June 1941, nine American battleships remained in the Pacific, including eight at Pearl Harbor, where they still were five months later, on December 7.
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The German triumph in France led some American planners to conclude that Europe, including Britain, was lost, and that the most practical thing the United States could do now was reduce or even end its material support of the British and hoard its arms for self-defense. Characteristically, Roosevelt listened and nodded to those who offered such advice, but he attached so many conditions as to make it effectively impossible. He viewed the survival of Britain as an essential component of American security. Instead of cutting back on American support, he decided to send a “special observer” to England to provide an independent source of war news. The initiative for that came from the British ambassador, Philip Kerr, known by his title, Lord Lothian. Lothian recalled to Roosevelt’s mind the critical role that Rear Admiral William S. Sims had played in the opening months of American participation in World War I, when he had collaborated with the British to
produce a coordinated Atlantic strategy. Of course, Sims had gone to London only after an American declaration of war. Still, Roosevelt thought it was a good idea, and he nominated Rear Admiral Robert L. Ghormley for the post. Though technically Ghormley’s mission was merely to discuss the standardization of arms, his presence in wartime London strengthened the link between the English-speaking countries, which may have been exactly what Lothian had in mind all along.
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That summer, Britain braced for a German invasion, though instead, in the first week of September, Germany began a sustained aerial bombing campaign of British ports and cities—the Blitz. As if impressed by that, on September 27, 1940, Japan formally joined the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. Now a future American war against all three of the Axis powers seemed not only possible but likely—perhaps even inevitable. Instead of refocusing American attention on the Pacific, however, Japan’s decision contributed to the growing emphasis on the Atlantic. In June, Marshall suggested that these circumstances “forced” the United States into “reframing our naval policy” to a “purely defensive” posture in the Pacific and making the “main effort on the Atlantic side.” It was uncertain, however, that the Navy could be convinced of that, and it was at this moment that Stark played a vital role.
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On November 12, at the height of the German Blitz against London and two months after Japan joined the Tripartite Pact, Stark took it upon himself to send Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox a lengthy memorandum in which he embraced the emerging reorientation in American strategic thinking. In case of war, Stark wrote, “the reduction of Japanese offensive power” could be achieved “chiefly through economic blockade,” while the United States devoted the bulk of its efforts to “a land offensive against the [European] Axis powers.” That would require “a major naval and military effort in the Atlantic,” during which time “we would … be able to do little more in the Pacific than remain on a strict defensive.” He acknowledged that such a policy would allow Japan to consolidate its early conquests. Nevertheless, Stark believed the greater danger was that Germany would complete its mastery of Europe, including the conquest of Britain. If that happened, any future campaign to defeat Hitler would become significantly
more difficult. It would mean that a subsequent invasion of Europe would have to be mounted from ports on the American Eastern Seaboard; instead of a twenty-mile-wide channel, an invasion fleet would have to span the width of the Atlantic Ocean.
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After laying out his argument, Stark presented four strategic alternatives, which he labeled A, B, C, and D. The last of them was his preferred option. Called “Plan Dog” in Navy lingo, it asserted that if the United States should find itself at war with both Germany and Japan, it would remain strictly on the defensive in the Pacific and devote its “full national offensive strength” to the defeat of Nazi Germany. “Should we be forced into a war with Japan,” Stark wrote, “we should … avoid operations in the Far East or the mid-Pacific that will prevent the Navy from promptly moving to the Atlantic forces fully adequate to safeguard our interests and policies in the event of British collapse.” Though others had been making similar arguments since June, Stark’s advocacy was crucial, for it put the Army and the Navy on the same side of the strategic debate. Moreover, Stark went further than Marshall had by proposing that because of the likelihood of a future war against Germany, the United States should at once initiate a series of staff conversations for joint planning between British and American senior officers.
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Knox embraced both the argument and the conclusions of Stark’s historic memo, and he commended it to the president. Roosevelt was characteristically noncommittal. He agreed wholeheartedly that Germany was the principal enemy. He was loath, however, to endorse any particular plan, for it was a central component of his administrative style to keep all his options open. He was also concerned about Stark’s suggestion to open formal staff talks with the British, for he worried about the impact that might have on domestic American politics. Though he had just been reelected to an unprecedented third term (that very week, in fact), he knew that formal staff talks with an active belligerent would be an overt violation of American neutrality. If news of it leaked to the public, there would be a roar of outrage, and not merely from the isolationists. Consequently, while he approved the talks, he made sure that they would be purely professional, without any input from or participation
by political leaders, and that nothing decided in them would be binding on the government.

THE ENSUING AMERICAN-BRITISH CONVERSATIONS
, known historically as the ABC conference, took place in Washington from late January to early March 1941. Nonbinding they may have been, but the fact that they took place at all formalized the emerging Anglo-American partnership.

Roosevelt stayed out of it. Initially, he thought about asking Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, a man whose advice he trusted, to attend the meetings and act as his eyes and ears, but on further thought he decided that only serving officers should participate. Sensitive to that, the Army–Navy Joint Planning Board stipulated, “In order to avoid commitment by the president, neither he nor any of his Cabinet should officially receive the British officers.” Even Stark, whose idea the conference had been, took part only to the extent that he and Marshall offered a brief formal welcome to the team of British officers. Then they got out of the way.
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Stark and Marshall did, however, compile a list of the goals for the conferees, the central one of which was “to determine the best methods by which the armed forces of the United States and the British Commonwealth can defeat Germany and the powers allied with her, should the United States desire to resort to war.” When they routed that memo past the president, Roosevelt picked up his pen, crossed out the word “desire,” and replaced it with “be compelled.” It was not his only change. The Marshall-Stark planning document offered six guidelines for the delegates, the first of which was “the defeat of Germany and her allies.” Roosevelt was completely on board with that, but he paused while reading the next guideline: that the United States would exert “its principal military effort in the Atlantic or in the Mediterranean region.” That reference to the Mediterranean bothered him. He did not want the United States to focus its main effort on the protection of British imperial interests from Gibraltar to Suez. Again he picked up his pen and inserted the word “navally” in front of “in the Mediterranean.” “Navally” wasn’t even a word, but at least it placed a theoretical limit on the role the United States might play there.
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