Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (4 page)

All of the officers attending the conference wore civilian clothes. Not only was this in line with peacetime protocol in Washington, but it also helped disguise the fact that American and British officers were involved in war planning. Though technically it was a meeting between equals, the British were clearly the suitors. Everyone in the room knew how close Britain was to starvation and defeat in that cruel winter of 1940–41. The British desperately needed American materiel support, certainly far more than the Americans needed to chain themselves to a besieged and battered ally, one that many feared would not last out the year. On the other hand, the British representatives came to the meetings with clear and concrete objectives, whereas the Americans were there simply to mull over possible ways to implement newly revised contingency war plans.

Through two months of “conversations,” the fourteen delegates came to appreciate that their views were largely congruent. The first important accomplishment was a mutual pledge to “collaborate continually in the formation and execution of strategical policies and plans.” That alone constituted a significant success for the British, for it ensured an ongoing partnership and tied the United States more closely to Britain’s fate. In addition, the British were ecstatic to learn that the Americans were willing to make the Atlantic and Europe the primary battlefield. “Since Germany is the predominant member of the Axis Powers,” their report read, “the Atlantic and European area is considered to be the decisive theater.” This was no more than Marshall and Stark had already concluded, but the news was a welcome revelation to the British. Notable as well was the fact that the final report, when it was completed in March, was sprinkled with phrases such as “When the United States enters the war …” and “When the United States becomes involved …,” as if such a thing were a foregone conclusion. It gave the British hope—hope that soon became expectation.
¹⁷

With all of the delegates committed to the defeat of Nazi Germany as the prime objective, the next question was how to achieve that goal. The report laid out a comprehensive strategy that listed seven “offensive policies” that would be applied to Germany. It was much too generalized to be called a “plan,” but it did illustrate an overall strategic vision. Those seven policies included a blockade of the continent, the bombing of Germany from the air, the conduct of raids on the periphery of Hitler’s empire, and support for
the occupied nations. Only near the end did the report mention a military buildup “for an eventual offensive against Germany” itself.
¹⁸

It is immediately evident that this program outlined a passive and peripheral strategy—the kind of indirect approach that the British had used against Napoleon’s empire a century and a half earlier. Of course, anything more ambitious than that would have required military assets far beyond anything the British possessed in early 1941, and the Americans, who were not yet in the war, were in no position to push for anything more direct. Nevertheless, two aspects of this strategic blueprint deserve special scrutiny. One was the third goal on the list, which was “The early elimination of Italy as an active partner in the Axis.” That seemed to contradict the guiding principle that Germany was the “preeminent” foe. If a conflict with Japan could be deferred until later, why didn’t that same assumption apply to Italy? Very likely the reason was that in early 1941, the delegates perceived Italy as a weaker opponent whose defeat was within the theoretical reach of their limited assets, while the defeat of Germany was not. Nevertheless, the identification of Italy as a preliminary step on the road to Germany was thus implanted early in Allied strategic thinking and planning.
¹⁹

The other noteworthy element in this list of “offensive policies” was the objective of capturing “positions from which to launch the eventual offensive” against Germany. This implied that the Allies did not
already
possess such positions—that, in other words, the “eventual” offensive against Germany would be launched not from the British Isles but from some other, as yet unidentified and currently uncaptured position. When connected with the goal of the “early” defeat of Italy, these two objectives foreshadowed the subsequent Allied campaign into North Africa and the Mediterranean. It is not clear whether the wording of either of these strategic goals signaled a deliberate attempt by the British to avoid a commitment to a direct assault on Germany from bases in England or whether they simply represented early and unfocused thinking constrained by limited resources. What is clear is that despite Roosevelt’s insertion of the made-up word “navally” into the initial guidelines, the British were already thinking of attacking what Churchill would later label Europe’s “soft underbelly.”
²⁰

There was some evidence that the delegates were paying attention to the inevitable command problems that were likely to arise when four services
from two nations sought to execute a coordinated military campaign. The Americans, historically wary of placing U.S. soldiers under foreign command, made sure to include a cautionary note: “As a general rule, the forces of each of the Associated Powers should operate under their own commander.” And if a theater strategic commander somehow did end up controlling the forces of another nation, he was not to disperse national units but keep them unified so that, as much as possible, they could remain under the command of their own officers.
²¹

One important outgrowth of the ABC conversations was the agreement to establish formal and permanent military missions in each capital. Each country agreed to send a senior admiral and a senior general to the capital of the other. Roosevelt had already sent Ghormley to London as an observer, but such representatives would now do much more than merely observe, for the new heads of mission were to engage in “collaboration in the formulation of Military Policies and plans” with their host nation, as well as “represent their own individual Military services.” It was not quite a formal alliance, and the United States was still technically neutral, but the ligaments of unity were growing and strengthening.
²²

The lengthy report (twelve single-spaced typed pages plus another fifty-four pages of annexes), dated March 27, 1941, made the usual rounds in both capitals. In Washington, Secretary of the Navy Knox initialed his approval on May 23, and Secretary of War Henry Stimson gave his okay on June 2. But underneath those was a third notation, also handwritten: “Not Approved by President.” It was not that Roosevelt disagreed with the report’s conclusions or recommendations. After all, he had already indicated his strong support of a Germany-first strategy in case of war, and he believed that having a contingency plan on the shelf was all to the good. He was unwilling, however, to have his hands tied, or to be formally associated with a document that came perilously close to collaborating with a belligerent power. To this point at least, the Anglo-American partnership, such as it was, was limited to staff-level conversations and kept secret from the general public.
²³

EVEN AS BRITISH AND AMERICAN OFFICERS
discussed possible future cooperation against Hitler’s Germany, the U.S. Navy was already at war
with his U-boats in the Atlantic. Only six days after the ABC conference ended, Roosevelt discussed new and more extensive responsibilities for the Navy in the U-boat war. He contemplated bringing more warships from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and ordered Stark to prepare an expanded and more aggressive convoy program. The new instruction, which Roosevelt endowed with the Orwellian name of “Hemispheric Defense Plan No. 1,” authorized U.S. Navy warships to attack without warning any German U-boat operating in the western half of the Atlantic Ocean. Before it could be implemented, however, Japan signed a neutrality pact with the Soviet Union. That removed one more restraint on the Japanese, and convinced Roosevelt to retain in the Pacific the warships he had considered moving to the Atlantic. Instead, therefore, Roosevelt approved “Hemispheric Defense Plan No. 2,” which authorized U.S. Navy warships merely to report the location of U-boats to convoys and to their escorts. Nevertheless, it was one more tentative step toward open warfare between the U.S. surface navy and German undersea hunters.
²⁴

Then on June 10 came news that a German U-boat (U-69) had sunk a United States merchant steamer, the
Robin Moor
. There had been no casualties, for the German U-boat commander had stopped the
Robin Moor
, demanded to see its papers, and then, deciding that it was carrying contraband goods (some target rifles and ammunition), ordered the passengers and crew to evacuate into lifeboats before sinking the ship. The incident had occurred weeks earlier, but news of it had been delayed until the lifeboats were found and the passengers rescued. Though it lacked the drama and the carnage of the
Lusitania
sinking back in 1915, it was an undeniable casus belli if Roosevelt wanted to make an issue of it. He might have issued an ultimatum, as Wilson had done back when Roosevelt had been his assistant secretary of the Navy. Instead, Roosevelt merely delivered a tough message to Congress that fell well short of an ultimatum. Hitler mostly ignored it. As it happened, he was preoccupied by other issues: two days later his armies plunged into the Soviet Union.
²⁵

With hindsight, it is evident that Hitler’s decision to attack the Soviet Union while the British remained defiant on their island was the turning point of the Second World War. It meant a two-front war for Germany, and
it roused the slumbering Russian bear, which eventually developed into a ferocious military giant. Hitler believed that the defeat of Russia would be only moderately more challenging than the defeat of France had been, and to ensure it, he applied overwhelming force. More than a hundred divisions crossed the Soviet frontier on that first day. The Germans achieved complete surprise and were soon deep inside the Soviet Union.

Roosevelt now had to decide whether Russia, like Britain, should be eligible to receive Lend-Lease matériel and equipment. It was one thing to provide war matériel to America’s British “cousins,” it was quite another to send arms and military equipment to Stalin and Communist Russia. In the end, pragmatism trumped ideology, and soon convoys of American ships were crossing the Atlantic bound not only for British ports but also on the long and arduous haul around the North Cape of Norway to Soviet ports on the White Sea. That strained American sealift capability further and also complicated the U.S. Navy’s undeclared war against German U-boats.

Indeed, by midsummer the situation in the Atlantic was becoming critical. Frank Knox insisted that it was folly to dispatch valuable war supplies, which had been built by American workers and paid for with American money, via American ships, only to see those ships sunk en route to Britain. Stark agreed, arguing that unless the U.S. Navy became more active in convoy protection, the effort to supply Britain would become “hopeless.” But how far could Roosevelt extend American naval protection over those convoys before it became a hostile act? He had already pushed the boundaries of neutrality beyond any generally accepted meaning of the term, and he was aware that there was a line that, if crossed, would constitute active belligerency. He worried far less about the legal niceties of such a line than he did about the reaction of American voters. Though he was a trained lawyer, his instincts were entirely political. Consequently, he acted incrementally, expanding America’s commitment to convoy protection bit by bit, as if probing the limits of what the country would tolerate.

In mid-July, as Roosevelt and Hopkins sat in the White House, the president tore a map of the Atlantic Ocean out of the pages of
National Geographic
. Spreading it out on a table, he took a pencil and drew a north-south line on it from a point two hundred miles east of Iceland down to the
Azores, roughly approximating the twenty-sixth parallel. He suggested to Hopkins that the U.S. Navy should assume full responsibility for policing the area west of that line, thereby allowing the thinly stretched Royal Navy to focus its attention on the war zones closer to Europe. It was not only another step toward active American belligerency in the Atlantic but another tie linking the British and American navies.
²⁶

By now, the American Atlantic Fleet, under the leadership of Admiral Ernest J. King, was operating under full wartime conditions. Even before the
Greer
incident in September or the
Kearny
and
Reuben James
torpedoings in October, American warships in the Atlantic came to general quarters with sufficient regularity that it became almost routine. At night the ships ran blacked out, and day or night they steered zigzag courses to throw off any hostile submarine that might be lining up for a shot. It was both reasonable caution in an active war zone and valuable training for war if and when it came.