About a third of the American force would be coming directly from the United States in a massive convoy, with the rest being drawn down from the forces building in England. In fact, the 29th Division would be the only sizeable American unit remaining in Britain at this time. The role of the 29th would be to generate radio traffic and other activity to convince German observers that they represented more troops than were actually present. One regimental combat team from the division would also board landing craft and stage an elaborate diversion along the coasts of Normandy to help keep the Germans guessing as long as possible as to the correct location of the impending Allied attack.
The main force of Canadian and American troops would land, hopefully unopposed, at Marseille and a number of minor ports all along the Mediterranean coast, with the Canadians holding the western flank, and the Americans responsible for the eastern and central portions. The initial convoys would also include ships loaded with weapons and vehicles sufficient to equip two French divisions up to American standards: one in Metropolitan France and one in North Africa, with the men drawn from the Vichy troops already in uniform. The rest of the Vichy forces would operate with their current equipment for the moment, until they could be rotated out of the line and reequipped and trained with gear provided by the United States.
It should be noted that the Canadians had been chosen to join the Americans, partly because the British were still reluctant to commit too many of their own troops, even in an ostensibly hypothetical construct such as HAYMAKER at this point, and partly because Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King had been alienated enough by the Dieppe fiasco to be willing to move into the American camp on this issue. Also, there was the logical assumption that some benefit should be obtained from the dearly bought lessons of Dieppe, thus the inclusion of the reconstituted 2nd Canadian Division.
Based on intelligence reports from British and American spies, the French resistance networks, aerial reconnaissance, and even analysis of the jealously guarded ULTRA intercepts of enciphered German radio transmissions, it was estimated that it would take the Germans at least twenty-four hours to react to the landings, if anything like tactical surprise was achieved. It would take another twenty-four to forty-eight hours before the leading German elements would come into contact with the initial French line of resistance, which would be pulled back well within the borders of Vichy territory. With American and British paratroopers helping in the delaying tactics, the planners expected that the lodgment area would extend the full width of the French coast and up to two hundred miles inland before the first serious ground battles took place, around D+5. By this time, the viability of the landings should have been proven, and a second wave of predominantly British troops from England would have come ashore and would form a strategic reserve.
The initial forces available to the Axis, even assuming that they stripped the defenses of northern France to a bare minimum, were estimated at perhaps three mechanized divisions, either panzer or panzer grenadier, and less than ten infantry divisions. The Italians, to the east, could contribute several more infantry divisions, but these would likely be of low quality and limited offensive capacity. Furthermore, they would necessarily be fighting their way forward through the Alps and relatively easy to contain. The Luftwaffe could be expected to pound the lodgment heavily, but German air resources would still be split between the quagmire of the Eastern Front and the need to continue to defend the Reich against strategic raids from England. The Italian Navy based at La Spezia and both German and Italian submarines also posed a threat, but this was one that both the British and Americans agreed could be handled, especially if the French contributed their own substantial navy to the struggle. By D+7, more German troops would be available, drawn from their central reserves or stripped from the Russian Front, but the Allied buildup would be continuing apace, and the planners were certain that Allied pockets were deeper than those of the Axis.
19 SEPTEMBER 1942
VICHY, FRANCE
All of the foregoing, despite its theoretical brilliance, meant nothing if the Vichy regime did not choose to cooperate, and it was under the burden of this responsibility that the Patton mission set forth. Patton was accompanied only by Colonel Vernon Walters, a young soldier of considerable intellectual achievement who spoke not only fluent French, but a number of other languages as well. They flew to Lisbon, then on to Madrid, and then proceeded by train on a four-day trip that eventually saw them arrive in Vichy in mid-September 1942. The ostensible purpose of the mission was to discuss the release of some Allied aircrews whose machines had been forced down over Vichy territory. Since American military men had come and gone through Vichy often enough since the fall of France, no effort was made to conceal their presence, and they worked directly out of the small U.S. Embassy.
Patton’s first problem was to determine with whom he should talk. There was no question that Prime Minister Pierre Laval was not only hostile to the Allies in general, he positively welcomed the German occupation as an opportunity to create in the rump state left to him a totalitarian regime modeled on Nazi Germany, replacing the liberal, bourgeois republic he had found so distasteful. The aging Marshall Petain, while his agreement would ultimately be required to obtain the obedience of the bulk of the Vichy officer corps, was kept in virtual seclusion by Laval, and he would not be the man to work out the details of any accord with the Allies. Admiral François Darlan, probably the single most influential military man in the regime, was also suspect as a collaborator and had, in fact, headed the government for a time when Laval had fallen out of favor with Petain, until the Germans had coerced the French into accepting Laval back into office. Darlan would have to be included in the talks, but no one was overly sanguine about the results if he were the main interlocutor.
Patton was met in Vichy by a young American diplomat, Robert Murphy, who headed the American mission in North Africa and who had been deeply involved in intrigues with clandestine Gaullists and anti-collaborationist Vichy officers for some time. Murphy was able to introduce Patton to General Henri Giraud, a four-star general who had electrified the world by escaping from a German prisoner of war camp the previous spring. Unlike Darlan, he had no baggage of deep-seated hatred for the British, and there was no cause to question his opposition to the Germans. Furthermore, he had steered clear of the Gaullists, who were anathema to the majority of officers in the French military for having spilled French blood in Senegal and Syria, and he carried considerable prestige in the army. Patton readily agreed to include him in their talks.
Lastly, Patton was introduced to retired General Maxime Weygand. At over seventy years of age, he was more a member of Petain’s generation than Giraud’s, but he was tremendously fit and boasted an obvious, venomous hatred of the Germans. Until recently commander of the Vichy forces in North Africa, he had engaged in repeated talks with Murphy and other Allied delegates on the possibility of France re-entering the struggle against the Reich.
Over a period of several weeks, the talks involving Patton, Darlan, Giraud, and Weygand were held at a variety of small, out-of-the-way offices of the military bureaucracy scattered around Vichy. The town swarmed with German agents, and rumors were periodically allowed to leak out that the French were blackmailing the Americans, demanding shiploads of grain and fuel oil in exchange for the interned fliers. Similar talks were also going on with General Francisco Franco in Madrid at the time, which lent credence to the story.
The basic outline of the issues soon became clear. The French were willing to consider both allowing the Allies into their territory in Metropolitan France and the rest of the empire as well as taking up arms at their side against Germany if the Allies could convince them that the resources to be committed would provide a reasonable chance of success on the battlefield.
Darlan put it succinctly: “If you come with two or three divisions, we will fight you. If you come with ten or twelve, we will join you.” He pointed out the case of Greece in 1941. Mussolini had inva
ded without Hitler’s approval, and the Greeks had soundly thrashed the attackers and even counterattacked into Italian-occupied Albania. Then the British had foolishly sent in a single division, which was no longer needed, as a sign of support to the Greeks, but this only gave the Germans a pretext and an incentive to pour in several army corps which soon crushed both the Greeks and the British and conquered the whole country. He then launched into a diatribe against the perfidious British who had cut and run as soon as the Germans attacked in 1940, who had left the French in the lurch and then cold-heartedly turned and massacred the sailors of their former ally at Mers-el-Kébir.
Patton cut Darlan short with a reminder that it was the Germans, not the British, who occupied two thirds of France and who held hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen as slave laborers inside the Reich. He suggested that Darlan might like to sort out his differences with the British at a later date, but it seemed to him that the first enemy to be dealt with should be the Germans. Weygand guffawed at the retort and thumped the much smaller Patton on the back with a force that belied his age.
Darlan, after recovering his composure, asked the pointed question of how the French could know just how much force the Allies really would commit to the campaign. Talk was cheap, he said, and divisions could be created out of thin air and never show up on the battlefield. He added that the French had nowhere to run, no boats waiting to take them back home if things went bad. They had faced the Germans alone once and had first hand knowledge of how merciful they could be. He began to wax eloquent, suggesting that, instead of swinging into the Allied camp at a time when an Allied victory was still very much in question, was perhaps less desirable that gaining better treatment from the Germans through more scrupulous compliance with their requests for raw materials and labor.
Giraud turned on Darlan bitterly and asked him how many prisoners had been released thus far, more than two years after the armistice. None, of course. He sneered as he talked about the much-publicized “relief’ program where French workers volunteered for duty in Germany factories on the theory that a French soldier would be released for every worker sent. They had volunteered in hundreds, then thousands, and still more were then coerced by the Vichy government at German demand, and still no prisoners had been released. It was time, Giraud shouted now, bending his tall, lanky body nearly double so that he could pound the dusty desk with more force, that France realize that the Germans would not be satisfied until France had been destroyed and that the least they could do was die with honor, reaching for even the slightest straw that offered any hope of salvation.
Patton acknowledged the point and suggested a simple solution. When all was in readiness for the attack, General Weygand, who enjoyed the respect of every Frenchman in uniform, from the Marshal himself all the way down to the lowliest Moroccan goumier manning an outpost in the Rif Mountains, would be invited to inspect the invasion fleet, or expeditionary force, Patton corrected himself He could count the ships, visit the transports and see that they were filled with men, not rag dolls, and examine the tanks in the holds. Patton assured his listeners that the Allies would not go to the trouble and risk of embarking the force they had in mind, over 100,000 men in the initial wave, building up quickly to more than a quarter of a million, with more on the way, and sending that force through waters where U-boat wolf packs lurked, just to stage some kind of massive deception. The French agreed, in principle.
The negotiations then focused on personalities, specifically who would lead the French and what would become of the collaborationists. To begin with, no one present had any qualms about sacrificing Laval on the altar of Allied cooperation. Darlan went so far as to offer to send Churchill Laval’s ears in a velvet box, but the group decided that his imprisonment, possibly on the island of St. Helena, for a historical touch, would be more appropriate.
They also agreed that Petain could remain as a figurehead as head of state. Patton, however, pointed out that Roosevelt and Churchill would be hard-pressed to accept an alliance with the kind of police state that Laval had set up under the Marshal’s tutelage. Darlan argued that many of the laws of Petain’s “national revolution” of 1940, laws restricting the press and setting up camps to train France’s youth and instill a sense of patriotism, while having a certain Nazi ring to them, were not very different from those in force in the Allied countries because of the war. He agreed that the hundreds of leftist and Jewish politicians who were languishing in Vichy jails and concentration camps could be released, although he suggested that it might be best for the peace of the nation if they were quietly shipped out to Canada or elsewhere for the duration and that foreign Jewish, East European, and Spanish refugees would also be released from the camps where they were being held. Darlan pointed out that many Frenchmen held the old republic responsible for the disasters of 1940 and would not rally to a new government that only promised a return to the old, corrupt ways. Patton agreed to this, and his instructions certainly did not include making any heroic efforts on behalf of the communists who had survived, even thrived, in their new underground existence and taken control over much of the resistance network.
Then the talk shifted to the subject of de Gaulle. All three of the Frenchmen hotly denounced de Gaulle as a traitor who had spilled French blood in a personal quest for power. He had never been elected to any office and only held the official rank of brigadier general in the old French army, which did not give him any authority to speak for the French nation. Patton argued that, for all of his faults, de Gaulle was the only man with any authority who had not accepted peace with the Germans and who had stuck by the Allies, adding that, if the Allies were to abandon him now, how could their word to any ally be trusted in the future. When the Frenchmen, however reluctantly, accepted the logic of this statement, Patton went on to assure them that the Allies had no intention of dictating to the French what form of government they should have or who its leaders should be. He suggested that de Gaulle be given the command of a corps composed of his own Free French troops, or perhaps a position in the government with a weighty title and not much substance, such as Minister of War.
Giraud cautioned, “If the Germans were to cross into Vichy territory tomorrow, the army would probably fight them. If de Gaulle’s troops entered it, there is no doubt that our men would fight them.”
Patton thought a long time, staring at a world map in a dusty frame that adorned one wall of the cramped office in which they sat. Suddenly, he rose and pressed his nose close to the glass.
“What about this?” he asked.
The others gathered around curiously. “Corsica?” Weygand asked. “What about it?”
“As you know, de Gaulle has not been made aware of our plans,” Patton explained, “but we can’t freeze him out forever. Suppose we took his Free French forces, they’re about two divisions’ worth now, and dropped them on Corsica. It’s French territory, so he’d be relatively happy, certainly closer to home than he’s been in awhile, but no Vichy troops to worry about. He’d be fighting the Italians. Once he was finished there, the rest of the army would already be busy duking it out with the Germans, and maybe the act of liberating Corsica would earn the Free French a ticket back into the brotherhood. Then you could worry about a post for de Gaulle himself. His men would see that the real war was being fought on the mainland and wouldn’t boycott it just to see that their chief’s feelings weren’t being hurt.”
“This wasn’t part of your original plan, General?” Weygand said, more as a statement than a question.
“Just thought it up this moment,” Patton admitted with a cocky smile. “But it would be a nice back-up. An unsinkable aircraft carrier right opposite Italy’s industrial heartland, and, once we have Corsica, Sardinia won’t last long. With both of them in our hands, our supply lines into Marseille would be secure. It should be a low-cost victory, and the Germans will be too busy trying to push us out of southern France to risk getting troops across the water onto that island, and the Italians shouldn’t
be too much of a challenge,” he went on, talking faster and faster. “By God, I like it more the more I think about it!”
After each session, the three French flag officers would visit Petain and explain the day’s dealings. There were further demands for American arms to re-equip the French Army and arguments about shipping capacity. Darlan put these to rest by pointing out that he would be contributing (he always considered French vessels his own personal property) more than a quarter of a million tons of merchant shipping to the Allied pool. If only a third of this were dedicated to supplies for the French Army, it would meet their needs, as well as the food import requirements of the population, and still leave a major net gain for Allied shipping capacity. To facilitate the incorporation of American equipment, the French quickly agreed to organize their new divisions along American lines, although, in the event, French divisions would always be smaller and weaker than their American counterparts, the French commanders considering it more important to have more generals’ billets to dole out and larger numbers of “divisions” to discuss at Allied conferences, than effective fighting power on the ground. All of these considerations were relatively minor, however, and, by the first week in October, Patton and Walters were making their tortuous way back to Washington to brief Roosevelt, Marshall, and Eisenhower.
26 SEPTEMBER 1942
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Patton had been in communication with Washington throughout the talks via encoded messages from the embassy in Vichy, although, given their own experience of having broken both the German and Japanese diplomatic codes, the Allies were understandably reluctant to entrust much in the way of detail to this medium. Consequently, there was some turmoil in Washington when Patton outlined the specifics of his agreement with the French. Cordell Hull had objected to the lack of more guarantees of a return to full democracy in France as part of the alliance package, and Patton had bluntly suggested that Hull provide him with a copy of the guarantees that had been received from the Soviets for the same thing, and he would happily work them into the deal with the French. Admiral King was very leery of letting the French know at all when the invasion was planned to take place, in case they should choose to pass this along to the Germans and lead the convoys into the largest ambush in history, and it was generally agreed that the French would be given only a general timeframe for the move—no specific dates until the armada was actually approaching the French coast. Lastly, Eisenhower was pulling his hair, or would have been if he had some, about the complications to the logistical planning involved with the addition of invading Corsica to his original blueprint. But, ultimately the agreement was ratified by Roosevelt and the Joint Chiefs.
Second Front: The Allied Invasion of France, 1942–43 (An Alternative History) Page 9