Instead, of course, it did take place—bringing the British and American military teams almost to blows. At one point the noise of a revolver being fired in the conference room—which had been cleared of clerks and junior officers—would be thought to be the start of a gunfight.1
The British, in short, acted at Quebec with extraordinary ill grace—loath to accept a policy in the Mediterranean that did not envisage or permit exploitation of what they saw as a unique opportunity, after the toppling of Mussolini, to strike at the outer pillars supporting the Third Reich. In his war memoirs Churchill would title this section of his account “Italy Won.” But as the historian of Churchill’s opus magnum would later point out, Italy was not won.2
Instead, the Allied campaign in Italy would arguably prove the most ill-conceived Allied offensive of the war thus far: a sad reflection, in all truth, of Churchill’s misconception of modern combat. Far from being a victory, it would drag on for almost two years, never putting the Allies anywhere near a breakthrough, and causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Italian civilians long after their government had surrendered unconditionally. It would incur almost a third of a million Allied casualties—killed and wounded—for no other gain than could have been made at virtually no cost in September 1943. And this largely because Churchill and his military team completely underestimated the German will to fight, not for their homeland but for every inch of other people’s territory as if it was their own: a demonstration of blinkered yet also professional approach to battle that had few parallels in the history of war.
The difference between Germans and Italians in their response to the Allied onslaught would say it all. On July 19, 1943, the largest single bombing raid of the war had taken place in Italy. More than five hundred B-17s and B-24s of Major General James Doolittle’s North African Strategic Air Forces had pounded Rome’s railway marshaling-yards and nearby airfields.
The raid had destroyed the equivalent of two hundred miles of railway track, and—in spite of millions of warning leaflets dropped the previous day—had resulted in some seven hundred civilian deaths:3 enough, when rumors of vast casualties spread among the Italian population, not only to frighten the Italian government to end Mussolini’s long reign as Duce, but to begin surrender negotiations with the Allies under a different leader, Marshal Badoglio, in order to avoid more destruction of their Italian homeland.
The Italians had not reckoned on the German response to their imminent capitulation, however—not only German forces in Italy, but Germans at home in the Fatherland, where German cities faced the same, indeed far worse, bombing than Rome experienced. Five days after the U.S. bombing of the Rome railway network, there had taken place an even bigger air raid, or series of raids: this time the combined heavy bombers of the RAF and USAAF attacking from airfields in Britain the northern German city of Hamburg—Operation Gomorrah. Employing not hundreds but thousands of bombers in rolling attacks, night and day for an entire week, the Allies created a literal firestorm—with temperatures of 1,000 degrees Celsius, hurricane winds of 150 miles per hour, and melting asphalt in the streets. By its end, Operation Gomorrah had killed some forty-two thousand people—the majority, civilians—injured thirty-seven thousand more, left the center of Hamburg in utter ruin, and had caused a million people to evacuate the burning city. Yet the result was the very opposite of reaction in Italy.
Instead of calls for the arrest of their country’s dictator and immediate unconditional surrender to the Allies, as in Italy, there was reported to be an even more relentless determination in Germany to continue to prosecute war to the death. It was as if any hope of conscience—Gewissen—had now been incinerated in Germany. Certainly it removed any sense of guilt at having been the first to launch such a war of ruthless conquest by Blitz and Blitzkrieg. The Allied raid on Hamburg—which would soon be replicated on Berlin—merely reinforced German stoicism: a collective will that was expressed in yet deeper loyalty to the nation’s leader and calls for the Führer, in their fury, to exact German revenge. In particular, for him to use, finally, the secret weapons he and Goebbels had publicly alluded to.
At his Wolfschanze headquarters near Rastenburg, far from Hamburg and Berlin, Hitler thus viewed the Allied bombing raids on those cities as more inherently counterproductive than his own earlier raids on London and Coventry in 1940 and 1941. Bombing would not bring Germany to its knees. The fact was, the Allies could not defeat the Third Reich, Hitler reasoned, unless they could defeat his primary weapon, the Wehrmacht. The German armies embodied the highest Teutonic virtues of obedience, courage, group loyalty, and self-sacrifice—and as he studied his maps and daily Abwehr intelligence reports, he rightly saw no signs whatever of an Allied intention to follow up the mass bombing of German cities with a ground offensive on Germany via the beaches of northern France—at least not for another year.
To the extent that, if they did attempt to breach the Atlantic Wall in the late summer of 1943, the Allied invasion forces would be crushed by his German divisions in France, the delay was disappointing to the Führer—and to Goebbels. However, if the Allies didn’t dare launch such an assault in 1943, as Hitler pointed out to his panicky generals, then there was no cause for alarm. The German Volk and the German Wehrmacht were too unified and imbued with too much resolve to simply collapse; rather, they would hold fast at home, despite the bombing, and fight hard and harshly abroad. They would treat every attack on German forces in the occupied countries as if it was an assault on the Vaterland—in fact on the very honor and courage of the German nation. Meantime, German scientists and engineers would make available the new, secret weapons they had devised that would give Germany the wherewithal, if not to win the war, then to negotiate favorable armistices with Germany’s enemies.
The war was not over, Hitler thus made clear. There was everything to gain by continuing to fight, implacably and fearlessly, to preserve the Third Reich they had so heroically created out of the ashes of World War I and the stupid Weimar Republic. Once he overcame his fury over Italy’s imminent defection, in fact, Hitler was seen to regain his composure—and confidence. Fall weather was approaching; it would soon make conditions for an Allied cross-Channel assault impossible. For all their superiority in the air, at sea, and on land, the Western Allies were, in sum, in no position to invade Germany—and without such an invasion there was little chance the Russians could, either. In fact, judging by the American and British performance against modest numbers of German troops defending Sicily—where only sixty thousand Wehrmacht troops had been committed—the Allies might not be able to seize control of much of the Italian mainland, whether or not the post-Mussolini government surrendered unconditionally.
By stamping on the Italians and by using the Italian mainland—with its mountain ranges that would provide good defensive positions—as a Hindenburg Line of the Third Reich, the Germans had nothing to lose, Hitler reckoned. And much to gain scientifically in the meantime.
For all his mistakes—holding on in North Africa, despite Rommel’s recommendation of evacuation after Alamein and Torch; holding on at Stalingrad rather than a calculated withdrawal; launching Operation Citadel instead of using his armored forces to entice and then crush a Russian offensive—Hitler was about to show that he had, in fact, a better grasp of the German war machine he’d built up over the past decade than his own generals. He was backed loyally and enthusiastically by the spirit of a whole nation, he felt, and was in a position to fight the war to the bitter, bitter end.
That Hitler was not wrong was certainly the view later taken by German official historians, in a kind of bemused, retrospective awe.
In fanning the flames of Volksgemeinschaft, involving a profound sense of national German community, identity, and destiny, Hitler had built upon quite the opposite of what most observers—even the Nazi elite, on occasion—assumed. The “belief that under National Socialism the Germans were, so to speak, subjected to total communicative and ideological brainwashing” by Hitle
r and his Nazi accomplices was simply not fact, the official historians concluded. “The widespread view that systematic government propaganda kept the population ready and willing for war, or even created a unified ‘national’ feeling among them, ignores reality,” the historians pointed out. “Identification with the nation could not be produced on command, and as a rule propaganda was convincing only to those already converted.”4
German nationalism, stretching back decades before Hitler, was in truth “the precondition for propaganda being successful, not the other way around.” Hitler and Goebbels’s propaganda had succeeded so well, in other words, because it hinged upon “established nationalist beliefs.” The “spreading of racist, xenophobic, or authoritarian stereotypes” had, as instanced in the conquest of Poland and huge swaths of the Soviet Union, worked so effectively because such propaganda was directed at “soldiers already predisposed to them.”5 In a country like Germany, given the country’s warring history since ancient times, Hitler had understood as an Austrian outsider that the very concept of democracy was foreign. German intellectuals had for centuries sneered at it—and had avoided practical politics, preferring philosophy, the arts, and science. With its rich history of land warfare at the epicenter of Europe, and its distaste for thinking through or dealing with the necessary compromises involved in civilized society, Germany’s people could therefore, in the wake of deep economic depression and defeat in World War I, be encouraged to focus on a supposedly egalitarian, simplistic expression of nationalist German identity: one that, in order to cohere and remain strong, must see others—whether foreigners or Jews, communists or non-Aryans—as enemies: enemies to be excluded, disrespected, defeated. And where deemed necessary, simply liquidated, without remorse or compunction.
Anyone who objected to the nationalistic program in Germany was “othered,” while “in foreign affairs” the “seed was planted for the future offensive war of extermination,” the German official historians concluded. “War, established as a permanent component of German politics as an inheritance from the First World War, from then on became the natural means of achieving political ends both at home and abroad.”6 Far from becoming a nation of warrior-serfs obeying a draconian führer, in other words, nationalistic Germans had become loyal and obedient members of a community—proud and arrogant citizens of a revived empire: a third Reich, a Volksgemeinschaft, a “master race” of individuals each cognizant at some level and largely supportive of the genocide being directed against Jews in Germany as well as outside Germany on their behalf; supportive, too, of barbarous treatment of enemies such as Russian Untermenschen, since the denigration of “others” only increased and inflamed this powerful sense of national German identity.
What Hitler had intuited, then, as Italy’s new leaders prepared to defect from the Axis Pact, was what many of his own generals did not: namely that the war would not be won or lost by cleverness or better tactical strategy in the East, the South, or the West, per se—tactics such as the fighting withdrawals that these German generals suggested, or the marshaling of armored reserves using the latest panzers in German counterstrikes. The war could only be won, in the end, by employing Germany’s national spirit: the amazing solidarity of its people, bonding in a nationalist saga that Hitler saw as mythic in the noblest, Nibelungen sense: a demonstration of national pride and unity by seventy million people at home, but especially so abroad when acting as military overlords—an achievement unmatched, in many eyes, since the Romans.
This national German unity that the Führer had channeled and directed would never be broken by aerial bombing or by peripheral Allied operations, let alone by the cowardly defection of Germany’s partners. It was not, in the end, a matter of winning or losing; it was a matter of hunkering down and asserting German moral and military strength, in dark days as well as fair ones. German forces had won, in the shortest time, almost unimaginable victories and territories. All genuine Germans were participants, implicated in its sins and a part of Germany’s new trial by fire. No one would be spared. There was thus no talk of the future, the postwar world, because the concept no longer existed—only the current defend-or-die struggle.
By fighting offensively in the Mediterranean in the hopes of German collapse, then, the Allies might well, Hitler recognized, play into German hands. Wehrmacht forces would be operating closer to home, the Allies further away from theirs. Moreover, German forces would have the advantage of mountainous terrain, easily defensible lines, highly disciplined and well-armed troops who would fight even better when shorn of their weak, former ally, Italy, once the Italian government capitulated. Moreover, by continuing—in fact expanding—its massed daylight and nighttime bomber attacks that inevitably killed so many German civilians, the Allies could truthfully be portrayed as barbarians—giving Hitler not only the “right” to use new weapons of mass destruction in reply, but impelling the German Volk to demand he use them: Vergeltungswaffen, as the secret weapons were soon called—weapons of revenge. Winged but pilotless flying bombs, launched from easily constructed concrete ramps and aimed to fall indiscriminately on Allied cities. And also ballistic missiles, with even greater range—and so high and fast they were impossible to shoot down.
As Hitler had assured Mussolini at Feltre, there was no need to fear the Allies—especially the British: their cities would, the Führer forecast, be “razed to the ground,” as they deserved. And unless the Allies dared take the risk of attacking Germany proper with ground troops, the Allies could not win. Moreover, if they tried to do so by launching a cross-Channel invasion, they would be easily repelled. Ergo, the Third Reich was bound, the Führer predicted, to prevail.
This, then, was the challenge facing the Allies even at the very moment when they seemed to be winning the war, both in Russia and the Mediterranean in the high summer of 1943. By underestimating German determination to fight on mercilessly in southern Europe, the Allies were heading toward disaster.
Only the President could now steer the Allies through these rapids, and to his great credit Roosevelt tried. Yet in truth he failed—forcing him to paper over the true military debacle, which now, as in a Greek tragedy, unfolded.
44
Near-Homicidal Negotiations
AFTER A HECTIC day at the White House on August 16, 1943, the President prepared to set off by train to Canada—hoping Churchill had done as he’d promised: getting his chiefs of staff to back off proposals for more extensive operations in the Mediterranean, once southern Italy was in Allied hands. And to start putting all British efforts into Overlord under an American commander.
Churchill certainly did the latter—to the consternation of General Brooke, who took the news badly. As Brooke noted in his diary, the Prime Minister “had just returned from being with the President and Harry Hopkins” at the President’s home in Hyde Park. “Apparently the latter pressed very hard for the appointment of Marshall as Supreme Commander for the cross Channel operations and as far as I can gather Winston gave in, in spite of having promised me the job!!”1
Since Churchill still did not believe, in his heart of hearts, that Overlord would ever really be mounted, he had shown no sympathy when speaking with Brooke on his return to Quebec. Nor did he tell Brooke that it was the President’s decision, not Hopkins’s. More importantly, however, he did not tell Brooke what had been agreed with the President regarding the prioritization of Overlord over all other opportunistic operations—hoping that the redoubtable Brooke would fight hard in the Combined Chiefs meetings for maximum possible interim American support in the Mediterranean.
As the Prime Minister admitted to General Marshall, when dining with the general in Quebec on the evening of August 15, he’d “changed his mind regarding Overlord,” and now agreed “that we should use every opportunity to further that operation.” But when Marshall said the first meeting of the Combined Chiefs of Staff that day had been pretty contentious over the issue of Overlord priority, and that the U.S. chiefs were adamantly opposed to preju
dicing the success of a spring 1944 Overlord by overambitious “bolstering” operations in Italy in the coming months, the Prime Minister had “finally dropped the subject, saying ‘give us time.’”
In relaying Churchill’s comment to his fellow American chiefs the next day, General Marshall assumed Churchill meant time for the British chiefs to swallow the inevitable, and put their energies behind Overlord rather than Italy. Marshall was wrong, however. Churchill was not one to give up so easily—and one way or another, the Prime Minister remained bent on pursuing his “soft underbelly” strategy, whether or not it prejudiced the success of Overlord.
Marshall had, after all, agreed to an amphibious American landing south of Naples, at Salerno, in two or three weeks’ time, as Churchill knew—in fact the operation, codenamed Avalanche, had filled Churchill with excitement. If all went well, not only would the amphibious assault secure the unconditional surrender of Italy but it would cut off German troops in the foot of Italy and open the road not only to Naples but to Rome. The consequences were irresistible. Once the Italians—who were still occupying positions all across southern Europe, from the south of France to Greece and the Balkans, on behalf of the Axis Pact—came over to the Allies, the soft underbelly of Europe would, Churchill remained certain, become the gateway to central Europe, promising to make a cross-Channel assault either unnecessary or pro forma. And a Russian inundation of central and western Europe impossible.
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