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

Marshall, placed on the spot, had “replied that there would of course be losses but that there were no narrow straits on our lines of communication” like Gibraltar—both in terms of reinforcement or evacuation—“and we could operate with fighter protection from the United Kingdom.”⁷

 

The President could only rub his eyes. No mention of the two hundred miles that Allied fighters would have to fly before they, like the assault ships, even reached the heavily defended invasion points, nor the proximity of twenty-five all-German infantry and armored divisions already stationed in western France, waiting and in constant training to repel an assault on its Atlantic coast, as they had done at Dieppe. No mention of the ease with which Germans could reinforce their Wehrmacht troops there, using short lines of communication from the Reich—and further armored forces they could quickly commit to battle. No mention, either, of the Luftwaffe’s ability to use French airfields to attack the invading forces. Above all, no mention of the Canadian catastrophe at Dieppe the previous August, only four months ago. Merely a heartless disdain for the U.S. casualties that would be suffered, in comparison with landing craft—and a deeply, deeply questionable assumption that the invasion would, as Marshall had assured Stimson that morning, be at such “terrible cost to Germany as to cripple her resistance for the following year.”

 

Marshall’s presentation of the strategy he recommended the United States should best adopt, as chief of staff of the U.S. Army, was thus lamentable—as even Marshall himself seemed aware, once forced to defend his position.

The President, however, was a model of tact—unwilling to humble Marshall before his fellow chiefs. How, exactly, he then questioned Marshall, was such a landing at Brest to be actually mounted by U.S. forces—and how did Marshall expect the Germans to respond?

Marshall twisted in the wind. “The President had questioned the practicability of a landing on the Brest Peninsula,” General Deane noted in the minutes of the meeting; “General Marshall replied that he thought the landing could be effected but the difficulties would come later in fighting off attacks from German armored units”—though “U.S. airplanes, flown from the United States, could give the troops help.”⁸

Again, the President was amazed. U.S. air power such as U.S. Army Air Forces were giving U.S. and British ground forces in Tunisia, in the battles of Medjez-el-Bab and Longstop Hill—where American casualties were reported as heavy, and the Allies were just beginning to learn how tough it was to defeat the Germans in battle? Tellingly, the President therefore “asked why,” if Marshall thought a cross-Channel invasion was the best course, “the British opposed the Brest Peninsula operation?”⁹

Embarrassed, Marshall had to concede “he thought they feared that the German strength would make such an operation impracticable.”¹⁰

To Admiral Leahy’s equally direct question as to when Marshall thought such a U.S. invasion of the Brest Peninsula could be “undertaken,” Marshall had responded: “some time in August.”¹¹

August 1943.

 

It was clear to both President Roosevelt and Admiral Leahy that General Marshall had not done his homework. Above all, the Army chief of staff had no practical idea how a U.S. cross-Channel assault could possibly succeed that very year—in six months’ time.

American armed forces currently had only eight weeks’ battlefield experience—and most of this fighting ill-armed Vichy French forces, not German troops. How, then, were they to miraculously produce by August of that year the commanders and warriors capable of mounting a successful contested Allied landing in German-occupied Brittany, so close to the German Reich, and then hold out against—let alone defeat—Hitler’s concentration of dozens of German infantry and panzer divisions stationed in northern France? And was Marshall really contemplating—as he’d said to Stimson that morning—the possible, even likely, defeat of U.S. armies on the field of battle, and a Dunkirk-like evacuation from Brest? How would the public at home in America—who in any case favored winning the war against Japan over the difficulties of war in Europe—react to that?

The President had not been impressed. Choosing, by contrast, to back further operations in the Mediterranean, where the Allies had “800,000 or 900,000 men” and were currently in the ascendant, would furnish U.S. forces with a good opportunity to gain tough, amphibious battle experience against retreating German troops, far from the Reich, and in a relatively safe theater of war. U.S. operations in the South Pacific were, after all, providing such experience at the very extremity of Japanese lines of communication and resupply, on the other side of the world. With half a million troops that “might be built up in the United Kingdom for an attack on either Brest or Cherbourg,” in Normandy, there was certainly every reason to consider a plan for their commitment to battle, if the Germans showed signs of collapse—but the President saw no reason to rush such a decision. He therefore asked whether “it wouldn’t be possible for us to build a large force in England and leave the actual decision” as to its use “in abeyance for a month or two.”

General Marshall took the point—saying he “would have a study prepared as to the limiting dates before which a decision must be made.”¹²

General Henry “Hap” Arnold, the Army Air Forces commanding officer, did not dare say a word—and Admiral King, embarrassed, very few.

There would, then, be no immediate decision on a U.S. Second Front in France that year—leaving the chiefs ample opportunity to discuss, with the British at Casablanca, the question of whether to assault Sardinia or Sicily if they crossed the Mediterranean after securing Tunis.

This left only the overall politico-military strategy of the war to be addressed. Which, without further ado, the President now rehearsed. “The President said he was going to speak to Mr. Churchill about the advisability of informing Mr. Stalin that the United Nations were to continue on until they reach Berlin,” the minutes of the meeting recorded, “and that their only terms would be unconditional surrender.”¹³

 

In the months and years that followed, wild claims would be made that, at Casablanca, the President had thoughtlessly and unilaterally announced a misguided war policy that “naturally increased the enemy’s will to resist and forced even Hitler’s worst enemies to continue fighting to save their country,” as the chief planner on Marshall’s team at Casablanca put it.¹⁴ Moreover, that it was a policy his own staff vainly disagreed with,¹⁵ and that neither Churchill, his staff, nor his government had had any idea of it, prior to the President’s announcement.¹⁶

Like so much popular history, this allegation lacked substance. Not only had the President discussed the matter with Prime Minister Mackenzie King a month prior to the White House meeting with the U.S. Chiefs of Staff, but the President’s determination to pursue unconditional surrender of the Axis powers had been widely discussed by Sumner Welles’s committees when conceptualizing the United Nations authority and end-of-war requirements—which were in turn shared with senior British government officers. In speaking of it to his generals on January 7, 1943, the President made clear his wish that the chiefs factor this objective into their discussions on military strategy with the British at Casablanca. Thanks to Torch, the war against Germany and Japan was no longer one of defense against Axis attack, but of Allied offense—offense that would not stop until Berlin was reached, and then Tokyo.

No negotiations. No ifs and buts. No concessions, or anything that could later be revoked. Nothing but complete and unconditional surrender of the Germans and Japanese, and their “disarmament after the war,” as the President put it to his Joint Chiefs of Staff, sharing with them as well his notion of a four-nation postwar policing force on behalf of the United Nations, which they, as the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, would have to lead.¹⁷

As for the cross-Channel invasion, he would, the President said, follow the Combined Chiefs’ advice on the timing “as they thought best.” For himself, he was anxious to hammer out with America’s allies not only the matter of German and Japanese postwar disarmament but other “political questions” that he would discuss with Mr. Churchill at Casablanca—and hopefully then at another “meeting between Mr. Churchill, the Generalissimo [Chiang Kai-shek], Mr. Stalin and himself some time next summer,” perhaps at the port of Nome, in Alaska, which was also the final stop for planes flying Lend-Lease supplies to the Soviet Union.

The Joint Chiefs did not demur. With that—save for a brief discussion of planes for Russia, and French sovereignty versus U.S. military government in North Africa—the meeting ended. The Commander in Chief had spoken, and the chiefs had been given their orders. They would depart that very evening for North Africa, where the President was to join them on January 14, if all went well.