The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  The fall of 1942 thus marked, in effect, the turning point in the evolution of the modern world, as the British Empire wound down. Though Churchill might shortly declare in public his refusal to preside over its liquidation, the fact was, Great Britain was now to become, to all intents and purposes, the staging post of American power in Europe.

  Reluctantly but with dignity, the Prime Minister—who had shown no mercy in putting down protest riots in India, where it was estimated that some 2,500 Indians were killed, 958 were recorded as having been flogged, and 750 government buildings destroyed5—accepted his new role. When the President instructed Harriman to return to London in mid-September to make clear to Churchill he wanted no further changes to Torch, and to insist it remain an American, not binational, operation, the Prime Minister gave way with little more than a murmur of protest.

  “I am the President’s loyal lieutenant,” Churchill said to Harriman in person6—and in a cable direct to the President on September 14, 1942, the Prime Minister repeated his expression of fealty in writing. “In the whole of TORCH, military and political, I consider myself your Lieutenant,” he wrote, “asking only to put my viewpoint plainly before you. . . . We British will come in only as and when you judge expedient. This is an American enterprise in which we are your help mates.”7

  As Harriman cabled the President that same day, the Prime Minister “understands fully that he is to play second fiddle in all scores and then only as you direct.”8

  Great Britain, which had once ruled more than half the earth, was now fated to play a subordinate role to the United States—a momentous comedown, but better than becoming junior partner, puppet, or quisling of Hitler’s Third Reich, as the Vichy French had done. Besides, there was the very thrill of imminent battle, which could not fail to excite the warrior in Winston Churchill.

  Ultra intelligence—decrypts of top-secret German military signals that Churchill loved to see raw and uninterpreted by his staff—was revealing the Nazis had no conception of what was about to hit them. Exultant, Churchill cabled Roosevelt on September 14, 1942, saying he was counting “the days” to “Torch”9—the more so since his own recent British landing, Operation Jubilee, had proven yet again an utter and bloody disaster.

  PART THIRTEEN

  THE TRAGEDY OF DIEPPE

  30

  A Canadian Bloodbath

  PRESSED BY GENERAL MARSHALL and Admiral King on their visit to London in July to mount Sledgehammer that year, Churchill had wisely refused. Yet he had also bristled at the accusations of British faint-heartedness—an accusation that in part explained why he allowed himself to be persuaded by his chief of Combined Operations, Vice Admiral Mountbatten, to go ahead with an operation that had already been canceled once evidence revealed the Germans were aware of it: a landing by an entire Canadian infantry brigade, with tanks, on the beaches of Dieppe, a small French fishing port south of the Pas-de-Calais, where Winston had once courted his wife, Clementine.

  Churchill had hoped the “reconnaissance in force,” as it was termed, would help convince not only Marshall and King but Stalin, too, that the British—which was to say, Canadians—were not lacking in courage. In a few days, Churchill had told the Russian leader, the operation—a sort of exploratory, miniature version of the full-scale Second Front landings planned for 1943—would be mounted across the Channel on a selected target with “8,000 men with 50 tanks.” They would “stay a night and a day, kill as many Germans as possible and take prisoners.” The landing, as Churchill had described, could “be compared to a bath which you feel with your hand to see if the water is hot.”1

  Stalin had shaken his head at such military and political naiveté. Whatever happened on the day—whether successful or not—once the troops were withdrawn the Nazis would simply trumpet their withdrawal as “the failure of a British attempt at an invasion” or retreat—which would help no one, he sniffed.2

  Launched on the early morning of August 19, 1942, the “Dieppe Raid” had proven Stalin’s prediction tragically correct. The water had been scalding, the raid a “fiasco,” as even Churchill acknowledged.3 The Germans, whose troops occupied the entire Atlantic coastline of Europe as far as the Pyrenees, were not only waiting, but had even been conducting an exercise the day before to rehearse repelling just such an assault.4

  As Stalin had predicted, the master of Nazi propaganda was over the moon when hearing of the operation. Goebbels had just landed in the Ukraine and been driven to the Führer’s “idyllically concealed” new advance headquarters at Vinnitsa on August 19 when the news was given to him that at “6.05 in the morning a major invasion attempt had been made at Dieppe.”5 The Allies had landed “more than a division, and had established in one place a small bridgehead. The RAF had thrown large forces into the battle. The English had brought 20 panzers”; moreover, a huge number of vessels were reported to be waiting at Portsmouth to “reinforce the landings if successful.” In other words, as Goebbels dictated for his diary, “under pressure from Stalin the British have clearly undertaken the attempt to establish a Second Front.”

  The Reich minister of propaganda had been contemptuous. “Not for a single second does anyone in the Führer’s headquarters doubt that the British will be given a resounding whack and sent home.”6

  Goebbels was proved right. In an eight-hour interview with the Führer, the propaganda minister recorded Hitler’s complete unconcern about Dieppe. In March that year the Führer had already stationed a top panzer division in the Pas-de-Calais area, with two further motorized divisions in reserve. They were not even needed—for by 2:00 P.M. on August 19 the invasion attempt had been “liquidated.”7 Sepp Dietrich, commanding the Führer’s SS Life Guard motorized division, would surely be swearing blue murder, the Führer chuckled, that he hadn’t even had the chance “to enter the fray.”8 Churchill must have ordered the landing as a sop to Stalin—the Russian leader a veritable giant in comparison to little Churchill, who could only boast a “few books he’d written, and speeches in Parliament,”9 while Stalin had re-created a nation of 170 million and prepared it for a huge military challenge, as Hitler conceded. In fact, if ever Stalin fell into German hands, Hitler told his propaganda genius, as Führer he would out of respect spare the Russian premier, perhaps banishing him to some beach resort. Churchill and Roosevelt, by contrast, would be hanged for having started the war “without showing the least statesmanship or military ability.”10

  Flying back to Berlin to direct the Nazi propaganda response to the Dieppe invasion, Goebbels could only mock at how Churchill then sought to cover up the “true catastrophe,” censoring and concealing in the press the huge casualties the Canadians had suffered. The Prime Minister had tried to parlay the attack into an “experiment”—but if it was such, it had achieved the opposite effect, Goebbels crowed. Not only had it shown how devastatingly effective were German defenses in the Pas-de-Calais and nearby region, but it had made the Führer decide to further fortify the entire Atlantic coast against invasion: a “full-blown defensive line in the same manner as the Atlantic Wall.” “If the British mount a real invasion next spring, where they’re planning, they are going to be battering against reinforced castle gates,” the Führer had assured him. “They’ll never set foot again on European soil. The Atlantic coast and the Norwegian coast will then be one hundred percent in our possession, and we will no longer be threatened by invasion, even if mounted on the most massive scale.”11

  The Führer had then turned to other, more important matters: his decision to seize Leningrad that very year, but to spare Moscow until the next year—though both cities were in due course to be completely “erased”12 as part of the complete destruction of any kind of Russian national heritage or pride. Plus the thorny problem of the German churches, which were to be threatened with the same solution as was being meted out to the Jews, given their Christian leanings toward Bolshevism and their failure to support Nazism wholeheartedly. . .13

  Churchill might ask the British an
d Allied press not to reveal the true extent of the Dieppe fiasco, but it proved impossible to conceal it from the Canadian prime minister, a thousand of whose soldiers had been killed in cold blood on the beaches of the harbor town, with further thousands wounded and taken into German captivity for the duration of the war—their feet even manacled, after an Allied operational order was intercepted and translated, detailing how manacling of captured German troops was to be carried out by the assault troops.

  Mackenzie King had opposed the idea of a major cross-Channel landing that year, as long as the Allies lacked preponderant naval and air forces, as well as experienced soldiers. Nevertheless, his defense minister had gone along with the revived operation—and was the first to hear reports that night of the catastrophe. “While [War] Council was sitting,” King recorded, “the first authentic word of its extent and probable extent of our losses”—completely contradicting a mendacious press release put out by Lord Mountbatten. In truth, the Canadian premier noted, “casualties were heavy. Number of Canadians taken prisoners but also many killed and wounded. One felt inclined to question,” he added, “the wisdom of the raid unless it were part of the agreement reached when Churchill was with Stalin.”14

  Stalin, to be sure, was blameless—having argued against such an operation. Well over half of the sixty-one hundred troops who had taken part in the fiasco had been killed, wounded, or captured.

  Two days later King’s heart sank still further, as more news of the fatalities came in. “Reports received of raid make one very sad at heart for losses, which have been considerable,” he noted again in his diary—German newsreel footage, bruited across neutral countries by Goebbels’s propaganda team, making it impossible to maintain Mountbatten’s fiction. How much better, Prime Minister King reflected, would it have been “to conserve that especially trained life for the decisive moment. . . . It makes me sad at heart.”15

  And on August 24, 1942, King lamented: “I keep asking myself was this venture justified, just at this time?”16

  In Washington, the President felt deeply for his Canadian ally: aware that, had Stimson, Marshall, and King gotten their way and launched Bolero that year, it would have been Americans who perished at the hands of the waiting Germans.

  PART FOURTEEN

  The Torch Is Lit

  31

  Something in West Africa

  WITH HUGE NUMBERS OF AMERICAN troops preparing to embark from ports in Britain and the United States for the invasion of Northwest Africa, how was it possible that neither Hitler, the commander in chief of the forces of the Third Reich, nor his Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), or German high command, saw the American invasion coming?

  Historians could never quite decide. It was not, after all, as if there were no indications of an American surprise attack. On Columbus Day, October 12, 1942, for example, the President had given a special Fireside Chat from the White House. Encouraged by what he had seen of American industrial output, he explained to listeners across the nation—and abroad—that the worst times were now over for the United Nations. The Axis powers had already reached their full strength, the President described; “their steadily mounting losses in men and material cannot be fully replaced. Germany and Japan are already realizing what the inevitable result will be when the total strength of the United Nations hits them”—moreover hits them “at additional places on the earth’s surface.”1

  Where, though? Reading British and American newspapers, Goebbels was less sure than the Führer that the Allies would now risk a Second Front, especially after the pasting the Canadians had received at Dieppe. “The Second Front seems to be definitively shelved,” the propaganda minister recorded in his diary on September 8, 1942—noting how even Russians were now contenting themselves with calls for the RAF to do heavier bombing rather than harping on an impossible cross-Channel invasion.2 But if not a cross-Channel Second Front, might the Americans invade elsewhere? The south of France, perhaps?

  Secret plans for military occupation of the remaining Vichy-controlled inland and southern regions of mainland France had long been drawn up by the German high command, code-named Case Anton, even though this would abrogate the terms of the Franco-German armistice, signed by Maréchal Pétain in 1940, following the French surrender. Case Anton would ensure the whole of the Mediterranean coast of France would be secured by German and Italian forces, if there were impending signs of an Allied invasion. But what of French Northwest Africa, where there were still only a handful of German officials?

  Goebbels, like Hitler, discounted the notion. In the United States, in the October run-up to the November 3 congressional elections, press hostility to the President was rising—“a pretty tough and massive critical mass,” Goebbels recorded with satisfaction.3 All the President seemed to have to offer were words. Not only were the Germans “stealing food from the rest of Europe,” the President had warned listeners in his Fireside Chat, but there had been an increase in the “fury” of German “atrocities” in Europe that would not be overlooked—or forgiven, he’d stated. The United Nations, the President declared, “have decided to establish the identity of those Nazi leaders who are responsible for the innumerable acts of savagery. As each of these criminal deeds is committed,” he’d emphasized, “it is being carefully investigated; and the evidence is being relentlessly piled up for the future purposes of justice. We have made it entirely clear that the United Nations seek no mass reprisals against the populations of Germany or Italy or Japan. But the ringleaders and their brutal henchmen must be named, and apprehended, and tried in accordance with the judicial processes of criminal law.”4

  Reading the transcript in Berlin, Dr. Goebbels had known far better than the President what “atrocities” were being perpetrated, and on what a sickening scale. He’d put little credence in the President’s warnings, however: neither the “additional places” where the Allies would strike, nor the justice that would be meted out for German—and Japanese—“criminal deeds.” A Second Front in France that year, or the next, would never succeed, Goebbels reckoned—the British failure at Dieppe having demonstrated the impregnable nature of the Westwall defensive line from Norway to the Spanish border. “The English know as well as we do that they are in no position to launch even a modest start in that direction,” he noted contemptuously a few days after the President spoke.5

  The threat of postwar American justice tribunals Goebbels treated with the same contempt. “One can just dismiss such things with a shrug of one’s shoulders,” he’d added to his daily diary6—secure in his conviction that German victory in the war would make the notion of criminal trials thereafter ridiculous. Even if the renewed German assault on the Eastern Front were to grind to a halt at Stalingrad and in the Urals, forcing the Wehrmacht onto the defensive for another winter, German forces had seized a prodigious amount of Russian territory, which could be used to feed the Third Reich rather than its own people. “We have a swath in our possession that will allow us to develop our potential in undreamed of ways,” he encouraged himself to believe,7 recalling Hitler’s grand design: German warrior-farmers, controlling a vast eastern border of the Reich in which those Slavs who were allowed to survive (half of all Russian captives were, in reality, killed or starved to death) would be kept as illiterate slaves of their German masters.

  The propaganda minister, whose genius had been to manipulate and orchestrate the entire output of German newspapers, radio, film, theater, and publishing, thus dismissed the President’s broadcast as hot air, glorying in Roosevelt’s “democratic” difficulties with Congress, his embarrassment at Wendell Willkie’s almost hysterical calls for a Second Front during a recent visit to Moscow, and declining support for the President in American public opinion polls—with anxious voices saying “We could lose the war!” or “We will lose the war!” Goebbels noted.8

  But if so, how was it the President sounded so confident in his Fireside Chats, Goebbels wondered9—as did Churchill in the English Parliament, too? What were they
up to?10

  On October 6, 1942, Goebbels admitted that, in terms of a possible American or Allied offensive in or around the periphery of Europe, “absolutely nothing is known.”11

  With the Russians continuing their “infernal resistance” at Stalingrad, all eyes were on the Eastern Front, where snow would soon fall. Weather in the English Channel would, by the same token, surely make a cross-Channel attack impossible, whatever reports Wendell Willkie might be taking back to the President from Stalin in Moscow. On October 17, 1942, however, Goebbels noted there were “rumors that the Allies are preparing for something in West Africa. Apparently such plans are quite advanced. It’s possible that the British and the Americans are trying to get clear of their commitment [to the Russians], and pretending to Stalin this would be a second front.”12

  No countermeasures were taken by Hitler’s headquarters, however, and by October 20, Goebbels was noting that the French—a nation on the down and out, in his view—were getting worried about their hitherto undisturbed colonial territories in North Africa. “Sooner or later the British and above all the Americans will appear there,” Goebbels accepted—not as a springboard to attack Italy and Germany so much as for reasons of imperial design, he thought. “The Americans without doubt intend one way or another to inveigle themselves into this war and do everything they can to pick up what’s going free, so to speak”—colonies. He and the Führer therefore contented themselves with the assumption that the French could be relied upon to defend their colonial territories with the substantial naval, air, and land forces they had in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Dakar.