Second Front: The Allied Invasion of France, 1942–43 (An Alternative History)

by Alexander M. Grace

  A French officer strode down the hill from the hotel. Skorzeny could see that his left sleeve was soaked with blood, and his teeth were clenched against the pain. Skorzeny smirked coyly and shrugged his shoulders again. This was apparently the wrong thing to do.

  “Scum!” the officer shrieked and raised his pistol.

  “Wait!” Skorzeny protested, putting his hands out to protect himself. The officer and his men fired together.

  CHAPTER 2

  DUELING STRATEGIES

  1200 HOURS, 10 JUNE 1942

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  THE SUBJECT OF the opening of a second front in Europe had been raised as early as the ARCADIA conference between American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Washington in January 1942. At that point in time, Churchill considered it vital to obtain a commitment from his new allies to an armed presence on the continent as soon as possible, and he lit a fire under the inexperienced American military leaders that proved hard, indeed impossible, to extinguish.

  On balance, things that January looked substantially better for the British than they had only a few months previously. In the spring of 1941 Britain still stood alone against the consistently victorious Germans, and had been stripped of her allies one after another on the battlefield. Although the specter of an imminent German invasion across the Channel had receded, Hitler now had the industrial might of the entire continent at his disposal, and there was no reason to believe that he might not renew his plans to crush Britain once and for all at any time. But Hitler had chosen to turn east and, on 22 June 1941 invaded the Soviet Union. The initial euphoria that this apparently overly ambitious campaign caused in London was short-lived, however, as German armies tore through the Russians like a hot knife through butter, carving out huge chunks of territory, destroying mountains of weapons, and sending hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers into prisoner of war camps. The same could be said of the sudden entry of the United States into the war—while welcome in itself, the Japanese were soon running roughshod over the thin defenses of the East Indies, scattering the forces of the U.S., the Netherlands and the British Commonwealth with no sign of stopping.

  Still, Churchill could now speak with certainty about the existence of a “grand alliance” including the two potentially greatest military powers in the world. The British had never been quite alone, of course, having at their backs the resources of their empire and Commonwealth comprising a significant portion of the land surface and population of the earth. But industrial power and usable military manpower were always in short supply in comparison to that available to the Axis. Even after nearly two years of preparation, the United States had little in the way of an army or air force, merely a vast mob of half-trained men, since most of America’s new weapons production had gone to help arm the British, and later the Russians; but this was only a temporary problem. The Red Army had taken a horrible savaging at the hands of the Germans, but the German spearheads had been hurled back from the gates of Moscow with considerable loss, and the Russians still possessed a huge army equipped with hundreds of superb new tanks. Britain’s own war seemed to be going well, with the Afrika Korps of Erwin Rommel having been driven away from Tobruk and all the way across Cyrenaica in North Africa.

  The problem facing Churchill in January 1942 was that of keeping the Russians in the field until the Americans could sort themselves out and ship a massive army across the ocean to confront the Germans directly. Despite the relief for the British of the success of the Russian winter offensive, Churchill had no illusions about the power of the Wehrmacht having been broken. In fact, it was increasingly apparent that the Germans were only now just beginning to mobilize the full resources of the enlarged Reich and its subject territories for the war effort, and, when the mud of the spring finally hardened, the Russians would be facing an armed force, if anything, even more powerful than that which had driven hundreds of miles into Soviet territory the year before. Since Stalin had seen fit to strike one deal with Hitler before, over the partition of Poland, it was not beyond comprehension that he might seek to do so again if the survival of his regime were at stake.

  To attempt to shore up his only ally with troops actually doing battle with the Germans, Churchill had diverted some of his own country’s precious military production to the Soviet Union and had urged the Americans to do the same. However, with every tank, truck, and bullet having to run the gauntlet of Luftwaffe bombers based in Norway on the Murmansk run or having to make their tortuous way across the Pacific and thence by rail over the entire length of Asia or through the mountains of Iran, this could never hope to be more than a relative trickle.

  What was needed, what the Russians demanded, and the only kind of support that they would understand and respect, was a major land offensive by the Western Allies against German territory. Since there was no magical way that armies could be created and transported instantaneously to the theater of war, what Churchill really hoped to obtain at ARCADIA was a declaration of purpose. He recognized that it had been the surprise attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor that had propelled the United States into the war, and although Hitler had committed a serious blunder by making his own declaration of war against the Americans, thus simplifying Roosevelt’s problem of convincing his isolationist countrymen to join that fight, the American public was focused on the Pacific.

  On a strategic level, however, despite Japan’s rapid gains and the stunning defeats inflicted on the Allies in Malaysia and the East Indies, it was clear that the Japanese had essentially reached the end of their tether. Nearly a million Japanese troops were stuck in the quagmire of an endless land war in China, and tens of thousands more would be tied down garrisoning their new conquests in Southeast Asia, besides those still required to reduce the dogged American-Filipino resistance on Bataan for months to come. The Japanese, therefore, simply lacked the resources to take on further major objectives, such as the actual conquest of lndia or Australia.

  Germany, on the other hand, still stood within an ace of knocking the Soviet Union out of the war and, despite Rommel’s recent setbacks, of capturing the Suez Canal and driving into the Middle East. If they achieved either of these goals, it was still distinctly possible that Hitler could redraft his priorities and tum his attention to a new invasion of the British Isles.

  Although there would be bureaucratic guerrilla warfare within the American military establishment, headed by the navy and by the amazingly influential and petulant General Douglas MacArthur, Churchill found his American hosts largely in agreement with his thinking on this subject. And it stood to reason. Despite its losses at Pearl Harbor and in the Dutch East Indies, the American Navy was still the country’s most powerful and battle-ready arm, and it was in the Pacific that this power could most effectively be used. American naval support for convoys to Britain would be welcome, but would require only a small percentage of either current strength or future production, with the Royal Navy making up the bulk of the effort. Europe would be a theater for land and air forces of sheer mass, while the Pacific would require small, elite, amphibious units and relatively less air power. Consequently, Churchill went away with a promise from Roosevelt to devote roughly twice as much American current strength and future production to Europe as to the Pacific, and a commitment to defeat Germany first while conducting a holding action in the Far East. As it turned out, American military might, when fully mobilized, would prove capable of pursuing the defeat of both ends of the Axis at the same time, but neither Churchill nor Roosevelt were optimistic enough to count on this in early 1942.

  The ARCADIA conference also saw the creation of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, an organization designed both to coordinate strategic planning between the two allies and to give the green Americans a chance to benefit from Britain’s hard-earned experience gained from over two years grappling with the Axis. It is worth noting that the Soviets were not even considered for membership in this council. Churchill, in hind
sight, argued that this was because the Russians had their own, unilateral front, but one might suggest that there was enough interconnectivity, in the area of Lend Lease for example, that at least a token representation might have been justified. At the time, there were also various plans afoot to send British or American ground forces, which by the end of the year would be sitting idle in England in their hundreds of thousands, to fight on the Russian Front, as individual air units actually did, which might also have made a Soviet presence on the staff worth-while. This decision might have avoided unnecessary complications in the making of strategic plans for the Western Allies and allowed for more candid discussions without the brooding presence of the bear, but it also sewed the seeds of distrust in Moscow about the intentions of the West. In any event, the creation of the staff did greatly facilitate joint planning by the British and Americans over the coming months and years.

  The situation in mid-1942 had changed significantly, however, and with it, Churchill’s attitude toward a second front. The Germans were again driving deep into Soviet territory, now threatening the oil-producing region of the Caucasus, and inflicting further massive losses on the Red Army. In North Africa, Rommel had struck again, inflicting a humiliating defeat on the British at Tobruk and reaching to within one hundred miles of Alexandria itself, facing the last defensive line before the Nile Delta at El Alamein. This was hardly a very promising scenario for the Allies.

  However, the overall strategic picture had improved in other ways. The drawn battle in the Coral Sea, followed by the staggering loss of Japanese aircraft carriers at Midway had, if not exactly crippled the Japanese war machine, at least signified a turn of the tide in the Pacific. The struggle against the U-boat menace in the Atlantic had also begun to lessen as the Allies developed new anti-submarine tactics for both naval and air units. And, while organized American military units had only just begun to trickle into the United Kingdom (about 36,000 men by May 1942), this figure was growing geometrically, and deliveries of equipment in the form of tanks, guns, and aircraft quickly replaced the losses suffered by the British in the Western Desert and fleshed out new units being raised at home.

  It is probably at this point, therefore, that Churchill became convinced in the inevitability of the Allied victory in the war, and his focus shifted to the shape of the post-war world. With Britain having lost virtually an entire generation of young men in the First World War, she could not afford another such Pyrrhic victory and still have the manpower and resources necessary to play the role of a great power and to retain her far flung empire following the defeat of the Axis. He thus favored a strategy of nibbling at the edges of the Reich, first finishing off the tenuous German foothold in Africa which dangled at the end of a vulnerable naval supply line; they would then gobble up the Mediterranean islands and possibly enter the continent at its remotest points such as Italy, Greece, Norway, or the Balkans. This would keep the Allies close enough to the center of action to be able to move in quickly should Germany suddenly begin to collapse, but would also have the advantage of leaving it to the Red Army to confront the bulk of the Wehrmacht in a deadly battle of attrition.

  The problem was that this approach did not coincide with the “American way of war,” which actually courted a battle of attrition, relying on superior resources of men and materiel to grind the enemy down with a minimum of elegant maneuver. This was the style instilled in the American Army since the days of Ulysses S. Grant in the Civil War and had been drummed into the heads of cadets at West Point as the gospel ever since. The original British encouragement for planning for a cross-Channel invasion at the earliest possible date had only spurred on this thinking, and any effort by the British to deviate from it was seen by the Americans as an avoidance of responsibility.

  Needless to say, Stalin, whose soldiers were still fighting for their very lives across the steppes of the Ukraine and into the outskirts of Stalingrad, viewed this “peripheral strategy” with considerable suspicion. It was not so long ago, of course, that British, French, and American soldiers had fought on Russian soil alongside the White Russians in an attempt to destroy the Bolshevik Revolution, and relations had hardly been any warmer in the years since the establishment of the Soviet government. Reports from Soviet agents of Churchill’s desire that as many Germans and Russians as possible kill each other off, leaving the Western Allies to come in after and pick up the pieces, while possibly not meant in quite that blunt a form, were just too plausible for the Soviets to ignore.

  This, then, was the background for the second series of meetings between Churchill and Roosevelt in the late spring of 1942. From their extensive correspondence between “a former military person” (Churchill, because of his brief stints of “war tourism” in Egypt, India, and South America around the turn of the century) and “a former naval person” (Roosevelt, because of his term as Secretary of the Navy), Roosevelt had a good idea of his counterpart’s philosophy and of the nature of the requests he would be making. Consequently, in order to have the maximum of facts on hand with which to balance Churchill’s legendary persuasiveness, Roosevelt quietly called a conference with one of the few military men for whom he had unlimited respect, if decidedly limited personal affection: Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall.

  Marshall had been in regular contact with the White House for some time prior to his appointment as Chief of Staff, due to his assignment as Chief of the War Plans Division during the hectic period of Roosevelt’s almost clandestine efforts to build up America’s defense establishment following the start of the war in Europe. Marshall had frequently gone to bat for the president before Congress, debating with diehard isolationists the need to institute a peacetime draft and to increase the paltry budgets of the army, navy, and the new army air corps, as well as to fund the shipment of arms to Britain under Lend Lease. Of course, Pearl Harbor immediately swept away Congressional opposition to a massive U.S. military build-up; however, it was still Marshall’s job to determine how to accomplish it. In this role, Marshall had been alone among his military colleagues, most of whom were far senior to him in rank, in his willingness to disagree openly with Roosevelt and to call into question the president’s sometimes fuzzy military reasoning. Marshall was always scrupulously polite and capable of saluting and following orders once those orders were made firm; but he would make himself heard first and let the chips fall where they may. Roosevelt and his personal advisor, Harry Hopkins, appreciated this approach, having come to learn that what they heard from General Marshall, virtually the only person the president could not quite bring himself to call by his first name, was his unvarnished, best assessment of the situation, not what he thought his superiors wanted to hear.

  Marshall, of course, knew what was coming in the showdown with the British, and had chosen to bring reinforcements to the meeting. He was accompanied by the rest of the Joint Chiefs and a strong supporting cast. The group included Admiral Ernest J. King, Chief of Naval Operations, and his deputy, Admiral William D. Leahy, who had just returned from a posting as Ambassador to Vichy France; General Hap Arnold, commander of the Army Air Corps, and Brigadier General James H. Doolittle, recently returned from his spectacular bombing raid on Tokyo; General George S. Patton, arguably the nation’s leading expert on mechanized warfare, and General Dwight D. Eisenhower, current chief of the War Plans Division. Roosevelt had not been expecting quite so large a group, having only Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson on “his team,” and from the fixed looks on the faces of the military men as they filed into the Oval Office, the president knew that they had come with a prepared agenda.

  Harry Hopkins wheeled Roosevelt out from behind his desk and, after some cursory introductions for some members of the delegation, they pulled up chairs and formed a rough circle around a low coffee table, while a Filipino steward in sparkling white coat and gloves laid out coffee on a sideboard.

  “Gentlemen,” Roosevelt began when the steward had silently slipped out of the
room and firmly closed the door. “As you know, the British Prime Minister will be arriving soon, and we have reason to believe that he will have certain requests to make of us.” The men nodded. “From what General Marshall learned on his recent visit to England and his meeting with the Imperial General Staff, we can assume that Mr. Churchill will ask for an American division to be sent to Egypt to bolster their line against Rommel, to fight under British command. There will, of course, also be requests for more equipment to be diverted from the fitting out of our new forces and sent directly to Britain. Unofficial rumors in London have it that Churchill will insist on dropping any thought of an invasion of the continent this year altogether in favor of seizing the French possessions in North Africa. I have called you together as an informal discussion group to get your views on this.”

  All of the military men instinctively turned to Marshall to begin. Marshall cleared his throat after a brief pause.

  “Mr. President, as you may be aware, I served on the staff of General Pershing for five years during and after the last war, and this kind of request is nothing new from the British. General Pershing was solidly opposed then, and I think we should oppose now, the idea of using American troops as fillers in a foreign army. We need to build and deploy an American army under American command. That is the only way to look out for the interests of our men and for our national interests.”

  “I would have to agree with that view,” Eisenhower chimed in, nodding his nearly bald head. “From our analysis of the situation in North Africa, while the British could always use a few more tanks to replace their recent losses, Rommel simply doesn’t have the strength to break their current line when he’s operating at the end of a supply route over a thousand miles long, and when the British already outnumber him substantially. He may have overcome the odds more than once in the past, but he isn’t a miracle worker. In any case, by the time we could get a division to Egypt, the thing is going to have been decided one way or the other. And an invasion of French North Africa, while it should be easy enough to do, will still eat up men and equipment, especially landing craft, that we need to stockpile for the main show in Europe. Even against minimal resistance, landing craft tend to be lost in high numbers, and we have all too few right now. All we’ll end up doing is set back our own timetable for a build-up in England for an invasion of the continent.”