Commander in Chief

by Nigel Hamilton

  Admiral Leahy had warned the President that there had been no breakthrough in the Joint Chiefs’ continuing dissension over U.S. global strategy. They were at loggerheads not only about whether to launch a cross-Channel invasion that year, but what to do in the Pacific.

  The ringleaders of the continuing argument against a Mediterranean strategy in 1943 were—as had been the case throughout the previous year—the President’s Republican secretary of war, Henry Stimson, and General Marshall. Colonel Stimson had openly bet the President that his “great pet scheme”—the Torch invasion—would fail. When it didn’t—in fact proved a triumphant success—Stimson had found himself embarrassed. On November 20, 1942, for example, former ambassador William Bullitt, who had been U.S. envoy to Russia and France and who was currently working for Secretary Frank Knox at the Navy Department on Constitution Avenue, had rubbed salt in Stimson’s wounded pride. He’d asked Stimson “how I liked to be a mere housekeeper of the War Department now that the President had taken over all relations with the military men.”

  Stimson had been infuriated by the remark. “I told him that so long as I was constitutional adviser to the President, he would not do it,” Stimson had countered. “But Bullitt’s remark,” he confessed in the privacy of his diary, “irritated and annoyed me.”2

  Fortunately the President was nothing if not sensitive to people’s feelings. Some days later he’d spoken with Stimson on the phone. They’d had “a talk on the situation and on my duties as Secretary of War. I told him then of Bill Bullitt’s recent fresh visit to me and his remark asking me how I liked being merely a housekeeper for the Army. The President said ‘What!’ and made it very clear that he was going to use me for a great deal more than that. He said Bullitt was always a problem child.” This was “very reassuring and satisfactory and balm to my soul after the troubles and suspicions,” Stimson had confessed, “that I had been through for the last two or three days.”3

  The President’s solace, however, hadn’t stopped the elderly war secretary from working behind the scenes to question the President’s military strategy in the Mediterranean—which he still thought utterly misguided.

  On December 12, 1942, for example, Stimson had recorded he’d had a “long talk” with General Marshall and also Jack McCloy, the assistant secretary of war, as to “what we are going to do after the North African campaign and what it is going to lead to; and from this talk and other talks that I have had with Marshall and particularly the talk which I had with the President last evening, I am very much more relieved because the trend is now to get back onto the sound line of an attack up in the originally planned route”—namely the possibility of a cross-Channel attack “next summer.”4

  Summer ’43?

  As the President had confided to Mackenzie King, as president and commander in chief he did not favor a cross-Channel attack until U.S. forces had had ample time, in the Mediterranean, to first learn the arduous business of how to defeat the Wehrmacht in combat—which might well take all of 1943, given that the English Channel became too rough to cross by September.

  Clearly the secretary was not listening. Inviting General Stanley Embick, the former deputy U.S. Army chief of staff, to his office at the Pentagon two days later, on December 14, 1942, Stimson had been determined not to be seen as a mere War Department housekeeper. Embick had been requested to report not to General Marshall but directly to Stimson on “the question of what we shall do after the African adventure.”

  The relationship between the two men went back decades—Embick having attended the Command and General Staff College with Stimson in World War I. At age sixty-four, he was now “head of our elder statesmen in military matters and has been made the head of a board of strategy together with Admiral Wilson of the Navy,” Stimson noted. “I knew that he had always been very skeptical about the North African adventure,” the war secretary added—anxious to know if the general had changed his mind.

  Embick hadn’t. “His position was very much the same as mine,” Stimson had recorded with satisfaction in his diary, “and I found it was confirmed today. We both feel that the North African adventure has done a great deal of good,” he allowed—though only because of luck, he maintained. As a result, “we have thus far gotten through without being knocked out by a great many of the perils that we might very well have had fall upon us and spoil the whole expedition.” Among these “perils” was German forces being ordered to invade or granted passage through Spain and shipped across the Mediterranean into Spanish Morocco—there to strike American forces in the flank. “Embick laid great stress on keeping the gate open [to Tunisia] and not impairing the forces that were under George Patton in Casablanca for that [defensive] purpose”5—i.e., denying Patton the chance to fight in Tunisia rather than guarding U.S. lines of communication running back from Tunisia to Casablanca. Morocco, both Stimson and Embick felt, should be kept well supplied and protected by large numbers of U.S. troops, to guard against a mythical German riposte through Spain, across the Mediterranean, and then across Spanish Morocco. “We regard that as the sine qua non of the whole adventure,” Stimson dictated in his diary.6

  “Embick was strongly of the opinion that it would be impossible to go any further in adventures in Sardinia or Sicily after we are successful in Tunis,” Stimson noted frankly—though making sure to exclude such passages from his later memoirs.7 “Our shipping absolutely forbids that,” he asserted, “and the line of supplies has become so long that it would be intolerable. So his thought is that after Tunis is cleaned out, if it is, if there is any surplus of American troops left over, we should send them up to Great Britain to be ready for the next attack there,” Stimson recorded, together with his own approval. In fact the secretary had called in the head of the War Department’s Operations Division, General John Hull, to join the discussion; “I found that he was in complete accord with both Embick and myself.”8

  Interrupted by visitors—a senator and governor from Idaho there to discuss the equipping of the National Guard in Idaho—Stimson had then returned to his office, where talk of the “next attack” across the English Channel in the summer of 1943 moved yet deeper into fantasy—in fact, seemed even more reckless than what Stimson had promoted in 1942. “Both Embick and Hull feel that the next step after we get back on the rails again up in Great Britain,” he’d confided in his diary, “and are prepared to go forward, is not an attack on one of the peninsulas”—i.e., Brittany or Normandy—“but an attack on the flat coast near Havre and the port of Calais, landing in a large number of places.”9

  The problem of first gaining experience in battle and amphibious operations against the German Wehrmacht—the President’s main objection to launching a cross-Channel attack prematurely—was thus simply ignored by Stimson and the senior officers of the War Department. The name Dieppe was simply never mentioned in Stimson’s diary. Or the savage lessons of the 1942 disaster, only four months earlier.

  Stimson was seventy-five years old; Embick, sixty-five.

  In younger men, such ill-considered ardor could perhaps have been forgiven. But for two individuals who had enjoyed distinguished military careers and had themselves served in war, albeit in a different age, to task tens of thousands of inexperienced U.S. servicemen and their field commanders with a perilous invasion across the English Channel, at the most heavily defended area—the Pas-de-Calais—was willful fixation. The tragic slaughter of so many Canadian troops at Dieppe was well known in Washington professional military circles, despite attempts by the British to cover up the appalling number of Canadian casualties.10 To imagine U.S. forces would, without more experience in amphibious operations, do better than brave Canadians in invading the fortified Pas-de-Calais area of northern France was pure hubris—the secretary and his colleagues at the Pentagon steadfastly refusing to see the Mediterranean as a necessary proving ground for the armed forces of the United States.

  The first serious encounter-battles after Torch had, after all, begun to take place
already in the last days of November and early in December, 1942, in the Medjerda Valley, outside Tunis. There, Eisenhower’s U.S. and British forces, including amphibious units and paratroopers, had gotten a rude shock. The sheer professionalism of German armored and infantry units, backed by Mark IV panzers with long-barreled 75mm guns as well as deadly 88mm antiaircraft artillery used in an antitank role, had stunned the inexperienced Allied forces. Aware it could take months before he could break through to Tunis—especially since General Marshall insisted that a whole U.S. army be kept back, guarding against the improbable threat of a German attack out of Spanish Morocco—General Eisenhower had therefore begun plotting an alternative end-run further south, which in theory could strike through the thinly held German flank in Tunisia. If successful this would, the young commander in chief of Allied forces in the western Mediterranean hoped, reach the Mediterranean coast, east of Tunis, before the Germans could be reinforced by Rommel’s Panzerarmee Afrika, retreating from Libya. Eisenhower had wanted to use George Patton for the job. He was overruled by General Marshall, who, with Secretary Stimson, remained obsessed with Patton being kept in the rear, defending the Allied flank.

  Quite how, if Stimson, Marshall, and Embick, together with a whole cohort of planners and operations officers at the Pentagon, so feared a German counteroffensive via Spain, they could seriously imagine a cross-Channel invasion by virgin U.S. troops against twenty-five or thirty German divisions in northern France would magically succeed was something the President found hard to comprehend.

  For the moment, however, the President had not interfered: trusting that, as American troops met German forces in Tunisia and the penny dropped, they would see sense. The British, after all, had taken three years of war to find a combat commander and the troops who could, at Alamein, defeat the Wehrmacht in battle. How on earth did Marshall, Stimson, Hull, and Embick imagine American forces would do so overnight?

  Not even reports of mounting casualties and the need for reinforcements in Tunisia—not Morocco—seemed to dent Stimson’s obsession, however. Indeed, by early January, 1943, Stimson seemed to be living in a fool’s paradise in his huge new office suite inside the vast 2.3-million-square-foot Pentagon building, on the south side of the Potomac River, completed only a week after the Torch landings.11

  Stimson had not been invited to the Casablanca meeting, but learning that the President wanted the Joint Chiefs of Staff to assemble for a briefing at the White House after his State of the Union address on January 7, 1943, before they left for Africa by plane, Stimson had decided he must have a “long talk with General Marshall this morning on the subject of the future strategy of the war. There are some conferences impending between the war leaders of America and Britain,” he anxiously noted in his diary—wisely withholding the location.

  Stimson was relieved to hear that Marshall and the senior officers of the War Department opposed further operations in the Mediterranean that year, once Tunis was reached. “Our people are adhering to their old [cross-Channel] line—the one I have approved throughout—and Marshall said that thus far they had the backing of the President,” he noted—erroneously. “In a word, it is that just as soon as the Germans are turned out of Tunisia and the north coast of Africa is safely in the hands of the Allies we shall accumulate our forces in the north and prepare for an attack this year upon the north coast of France—preferably one of the two northwest peninsulas”—Cherbourg and Brittany.

  At least the notion of landings in the Pas-de-Calais had been dropped—even the War Department’s most gung ho planners conceding that the Pas-de-Calais might be tough. “The one is selected,” Stimson noted of Brittany, “but I do not care to mention it yet. We think that we can probably hold such a lodgment but even if we don’t, even if our forces should be finally dislodged, it would be at such a terrible cost to Germany as to cripple her resistance for the following year.”12

  An amphibious cross-Channel invasion of France—the Brittany peninsula—in the summer of 1943, on the open acceptance it might fail and require its survivors to be evacuated, like the British at Dunkirk in 1940? An invasion that would nevertheless “cripple” the Germans, in order to facilitate a United States relaunch of the invasion the following year, 1944?

  It was small wonder Admiral Leahy had noted that “no agreement could be reached by the opposing elements”13 on December 28, 1942—Stimson and Marshall’s discussions at the Pentagon epitomizing, sadly, the complete lack of realism exhibited in the higher echelons of the U.S. War Department, only hours before the U.S. chiefs were due to leave to meet their British opposite numbers in Casablanca.

  The President, however, was not of like mind. And was about to correct them, in the nicest way he knew how.

  8

  Facing the Joint Chiefs of Staff

  AT 3:00 P.M. on January 7, 1943, Admiral Leahy and the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as the secretary of the Joint Chiefs, General John Deane, sat down beside the President in the Oval Office to discuss the strategic impasse.

  Mr. Roosevelt proceeded to run the two-hour meeting in his inimitable manner: refusing to follow an agenda but rather, with the greatest friendliness, asking each of the chiefs to present the case as they saw it: once Tunis was secured, where next? “At the conference the British will have a plan, and stick to it,”1 the President warned. Were they all, he asked innocently, “agreed that we should meet the British united in advocating a cross-Channel operation?”2

  They were, they said. But when? And where?

  To his credit, General Marshall, on behalf of the chiefs, was too honest to lie. All were not agreed about the timing, he confessed. Somewhat sheepishly, he explained to the Commander in Chief “that there was not a united front on that subject, particularly among our planners”—especially his own chief Army planning officer, Brigadier General Albert Wedemeyer.

  “The Chiefs of Staff themselves regarded an operation in the north”—i.e., across the English Channel—“more favorably than one in the Mediterranean” once Tunis was secured, “but the question was still an open one,” he admitted. “He said that to him the issue was purely one of logistics; that he was perfectly willing to take some tactical hazards or risks but that he felt we had no right to take logistical hazards. He said that the British were determined to start operations,” after Tunisia, “in the Mediterranean”—leaving “Bolero [an early code name for a cross-Channel invasion] for a later date. He said the British pressed the point that we must keep the Germans moving. They lay great stress on accomplishing the collapse of Italy which would result in Germany having to commit divisions not only to Italy but also to replace Italian divisions now in other occupied countries,” regions such as southern France, Corsica, the Balkans, and the Eastern Front.

  The advantage for the British, Marshall continued, would be a secure Allied sea route to Suez and India, and a base for major operations in southern Europe—not only knocking Italy out of the war but holding out the possibility that Turkey might abandon its neutrality and join the United Nations. In this scenario, were it to be selected, the island of Sicily, Marshall said, was considered by him to be the best target of assault, once the campaign in Tunisia was completed: “a more desirable objective” than Sardinia, he explained, but one that, in terms of amphibious assault, “would be similar to an operation across the Channel,” since the “Germans have been in Sicily longer,” and “there were many more and much better airfields for them than in Sardinia.”3

  Sicily, then, was the British preference. An amphibious assault on the island dominating the Mediterranean would offer a kind of rehearsal for a future cross-Channel invasion—certainly a better one than Sardinia. But should the United States consent to further operations in the Mediterranean at all? By continuing offensive operations in the northern Mediterranean, whether in assaulting Sardinia or Sicily, Allied forces would be subject to “air attack from Italy, southern France, Corsica, possibly Greece, as well as a concentrated submarine attack,” Marshall argued,
which could lead to a loss of 20 percent of Allied ships. To this logistical nightmare the general “also pointed out the danger of [neutral] Spain becoming hostile, in which case we would have an enemy in possession of a defile [across the Mediterranean] on our line of communications.”4

  Fear of superior German forces in the Mediterranean and scarcity of Allied shipping thus led General Marshall to “personally favor,” instead of further difficult operations in the Mediterranean, “an operation against the Brest peninsula”—i.e., the Brittany coast of northern France, across the widest part of the English Channel. “The losses there will be in troops,” Marshall acknowledged, according to the minutes of the meeting, taken by General Deane, the secretary of the committee, “but he said that, to state it cruelly, we could replace troops whereas a heavy loss in shipping” incurred in further operations in the Mediterranean against Sardinia or Sicily, “might completely destroy any opportunity for successful operations against the enemy [across the English Channel] in the near future.”5

  The President was shocked—as historians would be, years later, when the minutes of the meeting were published. Taking vast U.S. casualties in order to hit the ports or beaches of northern France that year, rather than waiting until commanders and men had successful battle experience in the Mediterranean?

  What was the hurry? Landing as yet completely inexperienced U.S. forces—commanders and infantry—across the widest part of the English Channel, to be set upon by upwards of twenty-five German divisions? Why invite such a potential disaster when they did not have to? Very politely, the President “then asked General Marshall what he thought the losses would be in an operation against the Brest Peninsula.”6