A World at Arms (128 page)

Whatever the merits of the Palaus operation, even while it and the Morotai landings were in the launching stage, highly successful American air raids on the Japanese in the Philippines suggested to Nimitz that the timetable for that operation could be moved forward from December 20 to October 20. The Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed with this change, as did MacArthur’s headquarters. The stage was set for an American return to the Philippines. The Japanese had landed there and attacked the United States in December 1941 in order to secure their access to the oil–rich Netherlands East Indies; the American return would both cut them off from their Southeast Asian empire and prepare the way for an assault on the Japanese home islands. The stage for this great operation had been set with the final preliminary assaults on Morotai, Angaur, and Peleliu.

In Europe, the belligerents looked toward a year of the most bitter fighting on all fronts. In the East, the Soviet offensives in the winter of 1943–44 were designed to continue the effort to free all lands occupied by the Germans and their satellites, a process examined in
Chapter 12
. The Soviet Union had committed itself to launching an offensive in the East to coincide with the invasion of Western Europe, but the exact location of that operation could not be determined until the situation had been clarified by the results of the winter’s fighting. The center piece of the Soviet summer offensive in 1944 would be a huge attack to destroy German Army Group Center which had held out so long and still clung to areas from which Moscow could be bombed. It is not known when the planning for what came to be known as operation “Bagration” actually began, but preliminary planning appears to have started early in 1944 with the broad outlines ready by mid-Apri1.
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In the interim, there was not only much heavy fighting, but the Soviet government moved on three diplomatic fronts after the conference at Teheran. One of these, the working out of a new set of agreements with Japan signed at the end of March 1944, is reviewed earlier in this chapter. A second is very difficult to analyze in the absence of any evidence from the Soviet side. On January 17, 1944, Pravda printed and Moscow radio broadcast a big entirely fabricated story about separate peace negotiations in Spain between von Ribbentrop and two leading British personalities. The story was, of course, denied in London. The purpose of creating the uproar caused by this fabrication is not easy to understand:
was it designed as a cover or excuse for any Soviet explanation of an agreement with Germany on its part? Was it designed to put pressure on the British to carry out their promise to take part in the “Overlord” operation? We will not know unless material on this episode from the Soviet side becomes available.
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Whatever the intentions of Moscow and despite the annoyed reaction of London, the British looked to the Soviet Union not only as a key ally in the war but a power with which they hoped to continue to have good relations in the future. As the War Cabinet’s Post-Hostilities Planning Sub-Committee was told on April 12, 1944, the assumption on which it was to operate “should be that it remains the policy of His Majesty’s Government to foster and maintain the friendliest possible relations with the U.S.S.R.”
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It was taken for granted in London that the Soviet Union could dominate all of Europe and Asia but was not likely to do so; the only real worry was a possible Soviet threat to Near Eastern oil, while all would in any case have to work together to contain Germany, the power still seen as the most dangerous threat to Britain. The United Kingdom was simply unable to respond favorably to a Soviet request for long-term credit; as Orme Sargent of the Foreign Office minuted on June 1, 1944, “in future we shall have to adapt our diplomacy to the requirements and capacity of a debtor country. In fact the instruments at the disposal of a creditor country, such as loans, credits, foreign investments and subsidies will no longer be at our disposal.”
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British as well as American Lend-Lease shipments to Russia were, however, at a high level at the time, and the Soviet Union for once in the war gave considerable public acknowledgment of it.
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Thus Soviet relations with the Western Allies were temporarily eased a little; even the arrangements for shuttle bombing with American planes using Soviet air bases seemed at last to be working with the first raid using them being flown on June 2, 1944. But a successful German air raid on the base at Poltava followed by raids on two other bases led the United States to abandon an effort which had begun with ambitious hopes for Allied cooperation, had been delayed endlessly by the Soviet government and had been carried through in its later stages only as a possible harbinger of future cooperation in the air war against Japan.
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Military cooperation between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies could only be at arms’ length, and, as discussed in
Chapter 13
, the political relationship was not particularly good in the early months of 1944 either.

The third major Soviet initiative directly related to the conduct of hostilities was the sounding of a possible peace with Finland. Near the end of 1943, the Soviet Ambassador in Sweden, Alexandra Kollontai,
presumably on instructions from Stalin following up on the discussion of Finland at Teheran, let it be known that the Soviet Union might deal for a Finnish exit from the war on specified terms rather than unconditional surrender. With the United States urging them on, the Finns decided to investigate this possibility during February and March 1944. The terms offered them provided for a return to the 1940 border, with Hangö exchanged for the Petsamo area, the internment or expulsion of German troops, and reparations payments of six hundred million dollars to be paid in goods over a 5–year period. The Finnish government, pressed hard by the Germans, misled by the temporary ability of the latter to hold onto Estonia, and still not reconciled to the border settlement at the end of the 1939–40 winter war, turned down these terms in April.
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It was surely a most unwise choice. The Russians now made plans for a major attack which would take Finland out of the war by crushing it as the first step in the 1944 summer offensive .

The planning of the Western Allies for 1944 was, as might be expected, concentrated on the forthcoming invasion of northern France, operation “Overlord”. Eisenhower had been appointed as over–all Allied commander, taking over the pre-existing preparatory staff of General Morgan.
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Montgomery was brought over from Italy to control the land forces in the initial assault and took in hand both changes in the existing plan and the final training of the troops, British, American, and Canadian, destined to take part in the landing. Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay was appointed to head the Allied naval forces and Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory was to lead the air forces. With Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Tedder as Eisenhower’s deputy, the higher command for Overlord was in place.

The details of planning and preparation are summarized in
Chapter 12
, but anyone in the United Kingdom could see that vast preparations were in hand for what was obviously an operation of tremendous proportions. The very extent of the preparations gave rise to conflicting reactions. On the one hand it was jokingly suggested that only the barrage balloons kept the British Isles from sinking into the ocean under the weight of weapons and supplies; on the other hand the general discussion could cause apprehension. As General Sir Hastings Ismay, Churchill’s military assistant, wrote to Field Marshal Wave II, then in India, on March 7, 1944, with the references to World War I which so heavily affected people’s thinking in World War II:

Feelings at home are very mixed. There are a number of people who go about talking as though all is over but the shouting; on the other hand a lot of people who ought to know better are taking it for granted that OVERLORD is going to be a bloodbath on the scale of the Somme and Passchendaele. Never has
there been an operation so widely advertised. One cannot help recalling Nivelle’s offensive in the watches of the night; however much one tries to put it out of one’s mind.
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In the meantime, the actual land fighting was of course going forward in Italy, but it was going so slowly
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that an effort was made, primarily at British insistence, to speed it up by a landing on the Italian coast well beyond the land front on which the Germans had stalled the Allied armies before the Gustav Line. British and American assaults tied down German reserves in anticipation of the landing with the British successfully crossing the Garigliano river in the east while the Americans were driven back when trying to cross the Rapido river to open a route into the Liri valley in the west. The defeat suffered by the 36th Division which had done very well at Salerno and would do even better in the later Italian campaign–caused bitter feelings after the war in Texas from which that National Guard division came; but in any case, the Gustav Line, anchored at Monte Cassino, held.
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The Allied landing itself at Anzio on January 22, 1944 succeeded, but incompetent leadership by General Mark Clark, the 5th Army commander, allowed the opportunity created by the initial surprise to pass unutilized. The Germans sealed off the beachhead and still held on to the Gustav Line across Italy. In the following weeks, they repeatedly tried to drive the Allies into the sea but failed because of a combination of brave fighting and accurate intelligence through code-breaking about German intentions. The lines around the bridgehead and across Italy would be broken only in a new offensive .
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Before that offensive could move forward, the great abbey at Monte Cassino was blasted to bits at the orders of General Freyberg, the able New Zealand division commander whom Field Marshal Alexander was not about to overrule. The Germans had ammunition under and soldiers and guns around it as the Vatican learned.
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The operation which freed central Italy and the city of Rome would precede the invasion in France.

The portion of the planning for that invasion which directly affected the Italian campaign in addition to the timing of the major drive in Italy itself was the planned invasion of southern France, then code-named Anvil, which was scheduled to utilize divisions from the Italian front. Having given up all hope of having Turkey enter the war by late January 1944
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Churchill was now all the more determined to have Anvil cancelled so that the forces in Italy could continue to fight there. His pressure to aid the French resistance and the guerillas in Southeast Europe at this time should be seen in part in connection with his effort to abort Anvil.
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That campaign belongs to the account of Overlord in
Chapter 12
, but it should be noted that Brooke was in these months doing what
he could to have Field Marshal Wilson, Eisenhower’s successor as the Allied commander in the Mediterranean, so write his reports as to assist: “for Heaven’s sake get Anvil killed as early as you can,” he wrote on March 6, 1944.
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Wilson, who was more realistic in this regard than Brooke, promised to try but offered little hope.

The other inter-Allied dispute with direct military implications for the Italian campaign was the quarrel over Poland. Because Polish army units played a major role in the Allied campaign in Italy, there was repeated and grave concern that changes in the status of the Polish government-in-exile in London and the new puppet government being created by the Soviet Union would have repercussions on the morale and fighting capability of the Polish divisions which were essential to the 8th Army’s effort.
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The campaign in what Churchill had referred to as the soft underbelly of Europe was not without difficulties.

In one field the Italian campaign was certainly paying dividends in the Allied planning and preparation for Overlord. One of the major objectives of the invasion of Italy had been the airfields near Foggia so that Allied planes could extend the range of their bombing offensive. (One of the reasons for the repeated attempts to push the Germans back and liberate central Italy up to the Pisa-Rimini Line had been the hope of securing air bases in the region north of Rome to extend the coverage of the combined bombing offensive even further.) The general impact of that offensive on Germany can be seen in the fact that by 1944 half of all German industry was working for the air force
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which, in addition to tactical support at the fronts, was making desperate efforts to rebuild a bomber force and to defend German-controlled Europe from Allied air raids. The new bomber force project is included in the discussions of German planning for 1944 later in this chapter, but the struggle to defend her cities and industry belongs in this context.

All during the winter of 1943–44, the British continued their attacks on German cities and the Americans their effort to bomb German industry. But the losses were high. It was in this context that the success of the Americans in meeting the need for fighter escort of the bombing missions into central Europe was of decisive importance. They had been steadily extending the range of the P-38s and P-47s to the alarm of some Germans.
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The use of the P-51 “Mustang” fighter, equipped with supplementary fuel tanks which could be dropped, changed the whole situation in the air war, which had looked for a while as if it were going in Germany’s favor.

Fighters now accompanied the bombers; and, as the effectiveness of the P-51 became obvious, the bombers were sent deliberately to targets the Germans had to defend, thereby forcing the Luftwaffe into battle.
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In January-February 1944 the Americans crushed the defense system which the Germans had laboriously built up; in February alone the German air force lost 1277 frontline planes in battle and an additional 1328 to accidents and other causes, both categories of losses very much a product of inadequate training of crews who were shot down before acquiring substantial experience.
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The almost total ability of the British and Americans to read the German air force codes helped achieve this spectacular victory as well as revealing the victory’s extent to them.
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Certainly Allied losses were heavy, especially in bombers, but in spite of these, the production and training facilities were increasing the size of the forces the Allies employed, even as the German air force was shrinking in size and dropping in the quality of its surviving crews.
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