A World at Arms (72 page)

Churchill argued very strenuously that if a landing on the French-Belgian coast was impossible there should be a landing in north Norway, long a favorite project of his, and periodically examined under the code – name “Jupiter.” Such an operation would at least hit at the Germans, would begin unravelling their empire where they had begun to put it together, and ease the difficult sea supply route to the Russian ports of Archangel and Murmansk. The Chief of the Imperial Staff always opposed this concept, arguing time and again with the insistent Churchill
and always managing to defeat the idea as too risky, not worth the cost, a strategic dead-end, and unlikely to work in practice because the Germans could always counter from their air bases in southern Norway.
¹⁴³

It is by no means quite so obvious in retrospect that Brooke was correct in his view. An invasion of Norway in 1942 would not have had such serious repercussions for any cross-Channel attack in 1943 as operation “Torch” did, and while providing less relief for the Allied shipping problem than Torch, certainly would have given some. The strategic goals of such an operation, which Brooke always claimed did not exist, were evident to Churchill: a safer route to the Soviet Union, a real diversion from the Eastern Front, interruption in winter of the German iron-ore supplies from Sweden, and major implications for the attitude of Sweden and the position of Finland in the war. Certainly the Germans always feared such a move by the Allies, and Hitler as well as the German command in Norway were especially concerned about this possibility. Hitler’s insistence that the German battleships and cruiser at Brest be added to the battleship
Tirpitz
and accordingly transferred to Norway, an insistence that led to the famous dash up the Channel of the
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
along with the heavy cruiser
Prinz
Eugen
beginning on February 12, 1942, grew out of his worry on this score.
¹⁴⁴
For the Germans, this meant a shift from a potential surface naval offensive against shipping in the Atlantic to a defensive posture in Norway; a point obvious to the German navy but not as yet to the British.

To the dismay of the British public, the ships slipped through the Channel under their noses unscathed, but to the at least equally great dismay of the Germans, both battleships thereupon ran onto mines newly laid by the Royal Air Force in the channels cleared by the Germans. The
Scharnhorst
was laid up for months while the
Gneisenau
was bombed beyond further use in the war while undergoing repairs. Other preparations by the Germans, including both getting reassurance from Sweden and making plans to invade her country, all show the German pre-occupation with a possible Allied landing in Norway, which they repeatedly saw as imminent.
¹⁴⁵
But on this issue, as on many others, Churchill yielded to the firm and unanimous opposition of his military advisors.

At the conference in London on July 18-22, the conflicting perspectives of the British and Americans had to be reconciled.
¹⁴⁶
Since the British made it absolutely clear that they were not about to go forward with operation “Sledgehammer,” as the Northwestern Europe project for 1942 was code-named, the Americans had no alternative but to agree to dropping it. Obviously they could not insist on an operation which
the British would have to mount and that the latter were certain would lead to a disaster which, after their earlier defeats, they simply could not contemplate. Given the situation at the time, this was very likely a correct assessment of the situation. The question then was what to do next. The Norwegian alternative was clearly out as well, having been earlier rejected in internal British discussions, and not appealing to American military leaders either. Some of the Americans, as already mentioned, wanted to transfer resources to the Pacific. Others did not wish to do this, and on this issue the decision of the American Commander-in-Chief, President Roosevelt, was unmistakably clear.
¹⁴⁷

There had to be action in the war against Germany in 1942 in the President’s judgement. If the psychic as well as the material energies of the American people were to be engaged in the European war-as the Japanese on their own had arranged for them to be engaged in the Far East-then it was essential that there be a major operation against the European Axis as early as possible. Waiting for that until 1943 was unacceptable. As for concentrating on the Pacific, that made no long-term sense.
¹⁴⁸
A victory in the Pacific lay years off and would hardly affect Germany, while a victory in Europe would have immediate and dramatic repercussions on the war in East Asia. It was, therefore, essential that a major operation be launched in the European theater in 1942, and the obvious possibility was a revival of the project to invade French Northwest Africa, operation “Gymnast,” discussed earlier that year and now all the more desirable both because of the great danger in Northeast Africa and the potential contribution to easing the terrible shortage of shipping by clearing North Africa of the Axis.
¹⁴⁹
The great dilemma was that either nothing could be done at all in 1942 or “Torch” (the new name for “Gymnast”) could be launched at the risk of postponing any invasion of Northwest Europe, now referred to as “Roundup,” to 1944.
¹⁵⁰
The decision agreed upon was a landing in Northwest Africa later in 1942, to be accompanied by a continued buildup of the American forces in England (operation “Bolero”) looking toward a landing in Northwest Europe, hopefully in 1943 (“Roundup”). Here, in “Torch,” the Allies had a project that looked difficult but within the realm of the possible to the British and the Americans alike. And the crises on Guadalcanal and in Papua were not allowed to upset the projected operation.
¹⁵¹

The Russians had to be told of this development, a difficult chore which Churchill planned to undertake in person; and there was a real possibility that with the reinforcements being sent to Egypt, the landing in Northwest Africa could be coordinated with a drive from the east to squeeze the Axis out of Africa entirely and open up Italy to attack from
the south.
¹⁵²
Now all depended on whether Egypt could be held and a counter – stroke launched from there, as well as on the capacity of the British and Americans to prepare and mount their first combined offensive of the war.

The disparate but related parts of the Allied program went forward simultaneously. Churchill went to Moscow on August 12–16 to explain to Stalin the impossibility of a landing in France that year as well as the British-American plan of a landing in Northwest Africa instead.
¹⁵³
The Soviet leader was, or professed to be, extremely upset at first but had to accept the decisions; having helped the Germans drive the Allies off the European continent in the first place, he was not in a very good position to complain about their difficulty in returning to it. Furthermore, he was impressed and gratified by the recent increase in the British bomber offensive against Germany and the plans to increase this effort substantially. The real difficulties of any major landing on the coast of Western Europe were illuminated in public a few days after Churchill left Moscow when a Canadian division with attached units landed at Dieppe.
^o
This major raid had been planned and called off earlier; it was launched on August 19 with disastrous results. The landing force was thrown back with great loss and without any diversion of German troops from elsewhere. The Germans were jubilant, and the Vichy French leaders were so enthusiastic about this victory that Pétain offered to join the Germans in fighting off any future landing attempts.
¹⁵⁴
At the same time, however, the operation taught the Allies a number of lessons which would be usefully applied thereafter, including the critically important one of landing on beaches and bringing their own harbors along rather than making a frontal assault on a port.
¹⁵⁵
The operation, however bad its later repercussions in Canada, did serve to lift spirits in England and the United States; at least someone was trying.

This was particularly important at that time because the United States was locked into a bitter battle of attrition in the Solomons, while the Russians were desperately trying to hold back the German summer offensive. The preparations for “Torch,” obviously, could not be trumpeted in public – though there is evidence that the Soviet ambassador in London foolishly leaked the information to newspapers
¹⁵⁶
–and the army in Egypt was not ready to strike back quickly. Churchill wanted a new offensive in September, but Montgomery insisted after Alam el Ha Ifa that his army had to be thoroughly retrained, both to carry out an offensive properly and to integrate the hundreds of new tanks and guns
arriving during September. Reluctantly Churchill agreed to an October date, just ahead of the planned landing in Northwest Africa.

On October 23 the 8th Army struck a surprised enemy. The postponement had given the Germans and Italians time to lay out enormous mine-fields, and the British units had a difficult fight. Over a period of twelve days the 8th Army crushed the Axis army facing them, though suffering heavy losses itself. Having rebuilt an effective and self – confident army, Montgomery was able to administer a defeat of such dimensions to the Germans that regardless of Hitler’s orders, Rommel, who returned from leave in the midst of battle, frantically tried to extricate the remains of his army. Only a small portion was able to rush back to the Libyan–Egyptian border, could not hold there, and was quickly pushed back toward Tripoli.
¹⁵⁷
A more determined pursuit might have destroyed Rommel’s forces entirely; but even so, the 8th Army entered Tripoli on January 23, three months after the attack at El Alamein, 1000 miles to the east, had began. The Italians, who pointed to German refusal to follow their insistence on taking Malta before striking into Egypt as the main cause of Axis defeat,
¹⁵⁸
had lost the last portion of their African empire, and the Mufti could no longer expect to return to Jerusalem in Rommel’s baggage car.
¹⁵⁹
At El Alamein, as before Moscow and at Midway, the Allies had won a victory that the Axis could hardly reverse.

The war in the desert had created one popularly regarded hero, Erwin Rommel. A great tactician of armored forces, a hard driving military leader, an enthusiastic admirer of Hitler, he had been given the opportunity to lead in a theater where an individual could stand out. A favorite of the Führer, he had been promoted rapidly, most recently to field marshal, and often disregarded orders and official channels; but his health was no longer the best and he was beginning to have some doubts about Hitler. Perhaps this crushing defeat – which would have been even worse had he obeyed Hitler’s order to let his army be destroyed in place – started him on the road to the forced choice between suicide and public trial and hanging, with the same German general who gave him the poison arranging the state funeral to which he was thereupon entitled.

The battle of October 1942 now established another general in the public mind. Montgomery had been Brooke’s choice for the 8th Army, and in the ups and downs of his career Brooke would back and shield him. A driving, self-confident professional, “Monty” as he came to be known, seemed a bit mad to many high-ranking officers in the British (to say nothing of the American) army, but he did wonders for the morale of a force that had been badly beaten. His soldiers got more of a sense
of him than those in most armies ever get of their commander, and they knew he might lead them to death but never needlessly. He would make his share of mistakes, many of them tied to his inability to work with others of high rank, but he provided a touch of hard professionalism, grim determination, and assertive confidence in carefully worked out plans that Allied armies, and especially the British army, desperately needed.

Long before Montgomery’s forces had reached Tripoli, in fact only days after the breakthrough at El Alamein, the Allied landing in Northwest Africa had been made successfully. The lengthy political preparations, in which the Americans and British hoped for a peaceful landing received by either a changed Vichy regime or a shift to new elements in North Africa, all failed.
¹⁶⁰
The last-minute hopes and predictions of the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) proved to be completely mistaken.
¹⁶¹
The possible disaster to British and American forces was averted by a combination of factors. The determined bravery of their troops landing in Morocco and Algeria was a key element. The decision of Hitler to occupy the unoccupied part of France convinced the last French soldier that the policy of fighting only the Americans, the British, and other Frenchmen made little sense.
^p
The unexpected presence of Admiral Darlan, who had flown to Algiers because of the illness and expected death of his son, would open the way for a political deal to assure a rapid Allied takeover in Morocco and Algeria.
¹⁶²
Perhaps the most important single factor favoring the success of the highly risky operation was the Allied attainment of complete surprise. The shortage of Allied shipping resulting from the U-Boat successes was thought by the Germans likely to preclude an invasion;
¹⁶³
the Allies had deliberately excluded de Gaulle from knowing of the projected invasion,
¹⁶⁴
and, as the British knew from their reading of German codes, the Germans had no idea of what was coming even as the huge convoys approached the West and North African coasts.
¹⁶⁵
In any case, once ashore, there was practically no way for the Axis powers to drive them out.

The problems and implications of the North African campaign which came to concentrate on a race for Tunisia and thereafter on a fivemonths struggle over that territory are examined in
Chapter 8
. Whatever the outcome in detail, the Allies had clearly seized the initiative. As Japan had been halted in East Asia and was beginning to be driven back on New Guinea and in the Solomons, so the European Axis powers
were now on the defensive in the Mediterranean. The hopes of the powers of the Tripartite Pact for joint action had been ended; they were now separately on the defensive.