THE USA IN THE TIME OF FDR 1943
WORLD WAR II 1943
by Mike Donovan
HAPPY NEW YEAR
The nation went clubbing on New Years Eve, 1942-3, but the celebrating was notably subdued. The fate of the world was in the balance.
Hitler issued a public statement that “with God’s help” Germany would still prevail. That Russian front had him concerned. But he was ok with his relationship to God.
In January 1 Basil Lidell Hart, the dean of military historians, wrote a widely published piece in which he predicted the war would be won in two years.
That was a pretty good estimate. The war lasted another two and a half years. But Hart also predicted that the United States might have to annex Canada after the war in order to prevent the Russians from forcing it off the hands of a weakened British Commonwealth. Russia would be expanding from Siberia.
Lidell also wondered why Germany had yet to seize one of the West Indian Islands as “a stepping stone towards invasion of the coast of Florida”
DIPLOMATIC FRONT 1943
ANFA CONFERENCE JANUARY 1943
FDR took a top secret train trip to Florida on the ninth of January 1943. To maintain secrecy the regular Pullman Porters were supplanted by Philippino laborers who spoke Tagalog and couldn't pass along top secrets very well even if they overheard them.
Roosevelt flew on to Trinidad, then to Brazil, then to West Africa. Franklin flew from there to Casablanca in Morocco and then caught a ride three miles south to the resort town of Anfa to met with Churchill for summit conference. The pow wow at the Anfa Hilton lasted from January 12 to 25 1943. Both leaders were accompanied by all the top brass running the war.
Stalin was invited to Casablanca but declined because he was too busy running the war. FDR had been trying to get Stalin to any conference for some time. In the spring of 1942 he had proposed to meet with Stalin in the Alaska area where the two countries meet. Stalin wrote back,
“Franklin, I was in Siberia for more than a year as the guest of the Tsar. I am not anxious to return.”
The Allied Summit at Casablanca in January of 1943 frustrated the Americans, who wanted a cross-channel invasion as soon as possible. Britian instead wanted a second front in Italy first. The Americans listened to the British arguments that a cross-channel invasion was still too risky. “We came, we listened, and we were conquered,” complained one US diplomat, Colonel Crag Quigley.
General Marshall by now was the man in charge of the US military. Unlike Churchill, FDR did not consider himself to be the next Duke of Marlboro, (even though FDR often smoked them.) FDR didn’t tell Marshall what to do or think on military matters, it was more vice-verse, but FDR had a strong will on political matters, and that’s why he was here (besides the simple fact that he wanted to make a trip somewhere exotic for the fun of it, and saw the war crisis as an excuse to do so.)
The Allies had expected to oust the Axis from Tunisia and all of North Afrika (Rommel speling) The Marshall plan was to try to talk the British by the need of 1942, but events in December of 42
had revealed that as a great notion not based on reality. Nevertheless, the Allies weren’t naive enough to think they weren’t going to prevail in NA soon enough. The question for the Anfa conference was, what to do next after North Africa is secured. Marshall wanted an invasion of the European continent in 1943, and more resources for the Pacific. He, therefore, did not support and invasion of Sicily, which was, of course, Churchill’s pet project. Marshall understood that the dire need in all theatres (I prefer the British spelling in this and ‘divource’ and other words) was not guns or food or ammo or planes. It was landing craft. If Anfa gave a green light to an invasion of Sicily, there would be no landing craft help for the Pacific and the idea of a cross-channel invasion in 1943 would be dead in the Channel water. Marshall proposed an invasion of the Brittany Peninsula, rather than Normandy or Calais. He even reasoned that if it failed, there would still be plenty of landing craft in place for a follow up attempt a few short months later. But if the plans for Sicily went ahead there would be no invasion in 1943, no matter how Sicily went. All landing craft available in Allied Europe would be tied up for a year, and GGM didn’t like that one bit.
Marshall and King at the least wanted a little more help in the Pacific. Everyone agreed on “Europe First” in principle, but to what extent? The informally agreed formula up to this point was 15% resources for Asia, 85% for Europe. Marshall figured if he was to “lose every argument with these Limeys” (my words, not his) he could at least bargain for a little more help in Asia. He floated the idea of 30% for Asia and 70% for Europe. Sir Alan Brooke, whose personality rubbed nearly everyone the wrong way, scoffed at the idea and said, “I was thinking of 90% for Europe and 10% for Asia.” Marshall grunted a wordless disapproval and King put his cigarette out and blew the last hit in Brooke’s face. But Brooke let the smoke pass and refused to budge from his snobby position that the British knew best and if only the Americans realized that they were blind cowboys, and left the real strategy to the veterans of sophisticated European wars and political wars, the Allied cause would be well served.
So King and Marshall came back with a proposal on Burma that they figured would to Churchill and Al Brooke’s liking (if it were possible for that crab to like anything but his own mustache.) The Americans proposed to mount a major offensive in Burma and win it back before the end of 1943, guaranteed. The British had to be interested in resources for Asia if the Americans were willing to put those resources to the British territorial cause in Burma.
Churchill, Ismay, Pound, Dudley, Portal, Lashua and Brooke all said no to the Burma idea which puzzled the Yanks. Why wouldn’t they want this one? It would even spare British lives, for Pete’s sake.
The British couldn’t say why they opposed it, and the truth didn’t really come out until after the war. The British opposed the American campaign to liberate Burma because it feared, quite correctly I would say, that if the Americans won Burma, they would not give it back to Britian at all, but would instead play high roller moralist and turn it over the the new United Nations for mandate or independence. It was no secret that FDR (and he personally more than any other America leader) was forever making statements to the effect that the USA wasn’t fighting a war to preserve the imperial British Empire, the implication being that after the war, the British Empire was going to the yard sale. Churchill complained bluntly on more than one occasion that he did not become Prime Minister to manage the destruction of the British Empire and if anyone wanted him to play that role they “could take a swim in the Thames in a lead bathing suit” (again, my words, not his, but the meaning the same.)
Memories of the continental stalemate of World War I plagued the Brits. They did not want to attack across the English channel until the Allies had overwhelming superiority. Americans departed Casablanca mumbling 'what’s next a diversionary campaign to liberate Antarctica?' The Americans thought that the simple goal was to take out Germany, not whittle away at the exterior lines of Axis communication. But the Brits liked to attrit. The wanted to wear Germany down from the outside edges.
The Americans said that if the cross-channel invasion was a non-starter for 1943 then maybe Britian could at least agree that more offensive forces could be diverted to the Pacific War. But the British continued to hold their position that the Allies in the Pacific must hold their position and not ask for much material help at this time. The Americans continued the argument until the compromise was reached to put a little more offensive material in the Pacific if the Yanks would back off their cross-channel goal for 1943 in Europe and support the invasion of Italy. Both sides also agreed to accelerate the strategic bombing of Germany.
DE GAULLE AT ANFA
FDR and Churchill wanted De Gaulle to be there for the Casablanca negotiations, but they sort of had to trick him into coming. If he knew that he was going to end up in a photo-op with Giraud, he never would have gone.
De Gaulle had his wounded ego on his sleeve at every turn of discussions with everyone. No one had a right to address him as anything short of “your highness
without him storming off because the pride an honor of France as well as hims own has been disgraced. Churchill and Isamy called him Joan of Arc behind his back and joked of finding the lumber to burn him with. He really was obnoxious by all the accounts I’ve read.
When he went to visit Churchill at Winston’s hut on a hill, De Gaulle was insulted to see that he was surrounded by armed bodyguards. He thought he was almost under house arrest until it was explained to him that the troops were to guard him against assassination. There were 21 plots in the works as a far as the MP’s knew. That soothed his anger a little.
The whole problem was, who would lead the French in both military activities and in administrative duties? Could a Giraud from Vichy co-operate with a De Gaulle and, more important, would De Gaulle even deign to sit in the same room with anyone from Vichy, let alone work out a political arrangement with such a person?
De Gaulle was willing to be number one, and if Giraud would accept the number 2 spot, that arrangement might be ok with Chuck. Giraud took a similar stand. If De Gaulle would serve as military commander, he would be willing to lead politically. There was no hope of reconciling the two stubborn stands.
Just to make sure the public didn’t get the impression that the situation had reached the impasse that it had, Churchill asked De Gaulle and Giraud to meet the press and pose for pictures. They did, and it’s hard to tell who in all of world history looks more uncomfortable posing for pictures, De Gaulle, me, or Giraud.
De Gaulle kept insisting that only a Frenchman has the right to make decisions regarding the conditions in French territory. It mattered nothing to the huffy snob that the British and the Americans, not the French, had done the hard fighting to free French Territory from Vichy Nazi rule. Of all the arrogant squids I’ve ever read about, he take the bon bons. French troops had embraced the Nazis for expedience, and had fought the Western good guys in Syria and Morocco, and along comes De Gaulle to say he is offended if anyone but a Frenchman has any say in how the newly conquered territories were governed, newly liberated Vichy French territories.
UNCONDITIONAL SUCCESS
On January 14, 1943 the two kings held a major press conference in which they announced to the world their decisions reached at Anfa/Casablanca.
The most controversial decision to come out of Anfa was the matter of “unconditional surrender.” It was not a formal part of the final statements issued by the conference. The blockbuster bombshell of unconditional surrender was simply a statement made by Roosevelt a day after the conference at Anfa was over.
Churchill never said a word of protest, so the word of FDR was as valid as any official statement from the summit typists. The Allies demanded nothing less than the “unconditional surrender” of Germany, Italy and Japan.
This meant that there would be no negotiated settlement with Axis nations. Hitler and Hirohito would not be allowed to set conditions for putting an end to hostilities. A defeated Germany and Japan would have to agree to place themselves at the mercy of the victors. Some writers later claimed that it came as a surprise to Churchill. They say that Churchill had never even entertained such a notion. The fact that Churchill never backed them up in his lengthy war memoirs seems not to matter to these historians.
Many historians say that by demanding unconditional surrender, FDR forced the Axis armies and civilian populations to resist to the last man. The hard fighting in the last fifteen months or so of the war could supposedly have been avoided if the Allies had not set such inflexibly draconian terms.
There is some merit to the argument. Goebbels and other German leaders celebrated the news. German leaders had been urging fanatical resistance against the growing Allied war machine but with limited results. Now, with one sentence out of FDR at Casablanca, the job was done. German morale for fanatical resistance had been handed to Goebbels on a platter. Accounts of the final drive on Germany in 1945 have Germans at many levels in both civilian and military positions citing the demand for unconditional surrender as a reason to fight to the end.
The critics say that unconditional surrender dealt a fatal blow to the German anti-Nazi resistance movement. Now even those good Germans who had been plotting to try and remove Hitler in a coup were forced by national pride to reconsider. To help the Allies win a victory leaving everyone in Germany at the mercy of the conquerors would seem traitorous, whereas before there was separation between Nazi and German national identity. The Allies had been ignoring secret overtures from the German resistance movement since the beginning of the war. Now they made their rejection of these overtures official (a German officer plot to kill Hitler with a bomb in a champagne bottle on Hitler’s plane had recently failed when the heater in the luggage compartment had malfunctioned, causing the temperature triggered device to not pop the cork).
Several Allied military leaders were against the decision to demand unconditional surrender. One contemporary Brit scholar determined that such conditions had not been demanded in a war since the Roman era when the Carthaginians were given the same terms and then had seen their city razed to the ground when they refused. Eisenhower was against losing so many troops in the desperate fighting he envisioned would result.
Historians (a minority of them) have accused FDR of making the unconditional surrender demand for selfish political considerations. The Democrats, especially candidates with New Dealer credentials, had lost big in the Congressional elections of 1942. The red white and blue enthusiasm for war was slipping away and the New Dealers were being criticized for the war effort more often than praised. Adding the demand of unconditional surrender to the cause was supposed to revive Democratic support by giving the war an aura of a moral crusade.
This school of thought says that the demand for unconditional surrender was selfish, reckless, foolish, and counterproductive.
I don't agree.
First of all the unconditional surrender posture was a signal to the Free French that the Allies were not going to allow the Germans to offer up their own version of a Vichy armistice. Allied support of the Free French would not be compromised. Unconditional Surrender was a signal morale message to the Russians fighting the war on the eastern front. The western allies would not dream of a separate peace ending the war short of victory.
FDR had a Treaty of Versailles complex. He had watched the end of World War I slowly lead to the beginning of World War II. Hitler and the Nazis had risen to power on the false charge that Germany had never been defeated on the battlefield in WWI. The German people came to believe in the legend of the stab in the back. The German Army had been stabbed in the back by the liberal politicians. FDR believed in the disease of German militarism, a fever deeply ingrained in the psychology of almost every German citizen since the time of Bismarck, was not a paranoid invention of reactionary idiots. It was visible to the tourist in Berlin long before the shooting of the Archduke Ferdinand in 1914. FDR and Churchill felt that this disease had to be extirpated down to the root, and a negotiated surrender of any kind would not fit the bill.
Historians have called FDR and Churchill ‘vindictive’ for demanding unconditional surrender. It’s easy to say this from the safety of an era that has not lost millions of its young men in two world wars.
A negotiated settlement would not necessarily lead to another German led world war, but history said there was a chance that it could. So the Allied leaders felt that they simply couldn’t chance it again. They had to be positively sure that no neo Nazi movement based on historical lies could arise out of a negotiated settlement leaving German national pride intact. German pride had to be defeated, as surely as the German armed forces. Both had to be crushed.
Was the German resistance movement was knocked out by the demand for unconditional surrender?
This seems to imply that if only someone had killed Hitler, all would have been well and the war would have been over. Apparently Hitler was the only important member of the Nazi party. There were evidently no subordinates below him that would have enjoyed taking over the reins of power. And of course there was no chance that his martyrdom would have been exploited successfully.
Millions of Germans had long chanted the man’s name with tears in their eyes. All of the armed forces personnel had sworn a personal oath to him. There is a perfectly valid argument that the assassination of Hitler could have created a morale boost for the Nazi war effort, with Goering leading a frenzied drive to avenge the great Fuhrer’s departed soul. Furthermore Adolph’s famed inept dictatorial interference with the Generals and Admirals trying to run the war was a factor that helped the Allies immeasurably throughout the second half of the conflict. This key advantage, his egotistical stupidity, would have been taken out with his cold body. New Nazi leadership might have prolonged the war by three years, supervising the deployment of German nuclear rockets in 1946 or 7.
In the final analysis, the goal of unconditional surrender was probably not a strategic or moral blunder, but making that goal public in mid-war probably was. The Axis troops might have lost their spirit sooner if this demand hadn’t put their pride that much more on the line.
NORTH AFRICA 1943
The New Year began with the British chasing Rommel from Cyranaica into Libya on the eastern NA front, and the combined American-British moving against General Tyre on the western NA front.
When Rommel was winning in 41 and going back and forth between victory and defeat in 1942, Hitler didn't send him a lot of reinforcements. He let Rommel do his overrated magic with the two Afrika Korps division originally deployed there in February of 1941. But as the Allies began to close in on Tunisia, where the German/Italians had fallen into a defensive perimeter, Hitler changed his evil mind. Germany rushed major military power to the desert. Herr Hitler hated to take any supplies away from the desperate Russian front, but he 'got it' that to lose in North Africa would mean that the enemy would soon be at his doorstep in Southern Italy and France. The Russian front was going badly but it was still far away.
Rommel got sick early in the year and had to go home to a hospital in Germany. Von Arnim replaced him. This has something to do with Rommel's legend. If he hadn't got sick and got out of there, he would have been famously defeated in North Africa, and sat out the war in Peoria Prison (where to the top Axis officer prisoners were usually sent.) No one general could have staved off defeat in North Africa in 1943.
But the Germans fought well from start to finish. It took Ike and Monty about as log as their worst estimates to finally clean all the Axis reptiles out of the mountains and deserts of NA. Hitler's decision to send defense material to North Africa was hardly a blunder even though he lost the battle.
DRIVE ON THE TUNIS FISH
Ike finally had the political mess out of his thin hair, and turned in late January to starting the serious offensive operations to capture Tunis, link up his forces with the Eigtht Army to the east, and drive the desert rats out of the barn.
The western front of NA was divided into three sections led by a British, a french, and an American ‘corps’ (a corps is a collection of about 2-5 divisions, a collection of 205 corps is n ‘army.’)
The British lions under quarterback Kenny Anderson held the lion’s share of war materials. The Tommies were on the northern line of the front which ran 245 miles north to south.
JUST THE SFAX, MAAAM
Fredenhall’s corps was supposed to drive through the front and reach the Sfax on the Gulf of Clark Gabes, thus cutting off the two German forces from each other. Rommel would be blocked off in the east from his fellow Nazi forces near Tunis which had been transported across the sea in a hurry in late 42.
But Rommel had fallen back faster than anticipated. Monty was pushing him hard, and Foxy wanted to link up with the Tunis force. Therefore the Germans were already at Sfax when Fredenhall was supposed to occupy it and cut him off. The German Panzer divisions oat Sfax weren’t what they used to be, but they were more than a match for the green and too dispersed forces of Fredenhall. Ike learned of the situation and wisely told Fredenhall’s southern flank to stay put and not try and drive to the sea.
FFFF
The French 19th corps held the central part of the Tunisia front, and they did not fight that well against the Germans in general under general Pierre Juin. They were undertrained, under-equipped, and they also were French, so that’s at least three reason’s they might not fight well. On top of that was a fourth factor, concerning the Fifth Republic. The Free French officers under Juin refused to take any oderous orders from British commanders. They were still mad about Mers el Kebir and a few other similar incidents where Britian slayed French men. The fact that Britian had offered in 1940 to surrender its sovereignty and asked to form a united nation of France and Britian until Germany was defeated meant nothing to them. Britian didn’t ask France to surrender like cowards when the Nazis hadn’t even taken Paris yet. Churchill was in 1940 willing to hold out with France on the Brittany peninsula until hell freezes over, but France behaved like an obsequious waiter at a restaurant, saying to the Nazis, “Table for three million? Right this way!” Now they were high and mighty about the idea of taking orders from British officers. Fishe moi la pais! (French for “get away! don’t even talk to me!”)
The French sector in the middle simply wasn’t adequately trained. The Germans attacked them on January 29 at Faid and slapped them around but good. They retreated ingloriously after taking heavy losses in men and equipment.
Eisenhower and Harry Alexander told the French to fall back to the Western Dorsal mountains in the rear and ordered them to re-train to enter combat later. No one was really blaming the Free French for failing. At least they were fighting. But the Allied command could not trust them to hold the central Tunis fish sector any longer. The Northern front under Anderson and the Southern front under Fredenhall pinched their parameters towards the center.
Ike sent Juin back a week later to command the center group, but most of Juin’s troops were no longer French. For political reasons it was still called the French 19 Corps and remained under Juin’s command. The image of a united force of three great nations was more important than punishing the FFFF (failed Free French forces) in public.
VON ARNIM AND ROMMEL
Rommel was now down to a collective one division (out of an original three in the AK.) He was falling back before Montgomery’s 8th Army and making a stand at the Mareth Line, and old French defensive work that wasn’t very good.
In Tunisia Von Arnim had more and fresher German material to work with. Von Arnim didn’t like Rommel. He thought the Fox was an uncouth interloper in the world of sophisticated German brass.
The Italians were being very critical of Rommel for retreating, which was idiotic on so many levels, like a wife yelling at her husband 300 feet up on a ladder because he “didn’t really try hard enough” to replace that light bulb. Rommel was still sick with intestinal disorder (he couldn’t stomach fighting in the cause of evil.) Hitler gave him permission to return to Europe but Rommel stayed with his men.
Rommel and Von Arnim were still worried that an Allied attack towards the Gulf of Gabes might separate their two forces permanently, so they decided to attack the US forces in the center to prevent them from attacking first. This was the lead in to the Battle of the Kasserine Pass, one of the worst defeats for American in the war.
“KASSIE”
The battle was joined for America (in 1943) at a place called Kasserine Pass. Here the Germans under General von Arnim and Rommel launched a surprise counterattack at US lines and a supply base. The American Army tried to stop the attack but suffered heavy casualties. One battalion after another was bashed. After all the marital spirit after Pearl Harbor, the first major US Army action in the European war was nothing less than one of the most disastrous defeats in American military history. Hundreds of American tanks were left burning in the desert. Welcome to the NFL.
US troops had grown overconfident after the virtually unopposed landings at Casablanca Algiers and Oran. This was an unexpected mistreat.
However having said that, let’s take a fair overview of this famous American defeat. Kasserine Pass has come to be the label for what was actually a serious attempt to break through American-Brths French lines and win a big one in the Tunisia theater. KP was only one part of a large offensive campaign. Rommel and Arnin were trying to break completely through the western Dorsal Mountains and maybe reach the sea at Bone, thus turning the entire momentum of the North African situation. It was only logical to give it a try. Why just sit and slowly succumb to superior forces closing in? Kesselring approved the Kasserine operation from Euro HQ. Kess appreciated that Kass was only one part of the picture.
After bashing the green Yankees at the K-Pass, the two German columns were stopped shortly thereafter at Thayla, Shiba and Tebessa. They aren’t as exiting as Kassering because all that happened at these three places was that the German attack stalled to a halt before solid military forces and geo obstacles. Soon Von Arnim and Rommel retreated back through the very same Kasserine Pass they had kicked Sam around in. History hardly notices that the Germans fell back through the KP as surely as they had advanced through it.
The overall campaign that has ended up with the name Kasserine Pass was actually a failed German offensive, a desert rat 1943 version of the Battle of the Bulge in 44. It’s sad that it is only remembered as an American defeat. It was like a soccer player putting dazzling moves on three players to get down close to the goal. The sports analysts are producing entire documentaries about how great the moves were. But they forget that when he got to within shooting distance of the goal, someone took the ball back, nothing came of it, and his team lost the game.
Kasserine Pass had another benefit. It was like the First Bull Run in 1861. The Union men took a beating but defeat woke them up to the need for better training, better discipline, logistics and the permanent discarding of any feelings of arrogant overconfidence. It was certainly embarrassing. Britsh and French PW’s even joked around with their German captors about how bad the poor martial quality of the American fighting man. But that was corrected significantly in a hurry. The German brass noticed a change in American performance after Kass.
TANK TOPS
The US Sherman and General Grant tanks were inferior to the German Tigers and Panzers. Throughout the war the US Army dared not take either of them on directly in a tank-to-tank scrap. US tanks were later able to win victories based on superior numbers and superior reliability. US tanks rarely broke down mechanically while the other side’s did. After Kasserine the strategy in tank warfare for the US was to surround the Tigers and destroy them on the flanks through sheer numbers, but never to attack them ‘in your face’.
Brit-US relations had some rough moments. At the same time the US Army was getting the beating at Kass Pass, Axis forces defeated the US 34th Division at a place called Fondouk. The British commander told Eisenhower that Division 34 was obviously incompetent and should be sent back to the rear for more training before coming back to the war. The American generals were enraged to hear this unjustified criticism and overreaction. They felt that the Brits had no right to punk the 34th like that, especially since they felt that a British officer named Crocker had made the decision which led to the defeat of the US division. They said that the 34th lost the battle because they lost the battle for internal command and let the British officer make the wrong calls that the 34th paid for, and any division can lose a battle. Ike and Bradley stuck up for the 34th and refused to consider such an arrogant and conceited proposal. Later in the same Tunisian campaign the 34th was deployed in a diversionary attack role and performed extremely well, exceeding the mission assigned to it. Even if the 34th had failed because of a lack of experience, how is a division supposed to get experience if no one will hire it? A division has to start somewhere. Of course if the 34th had been a Free French Division, it might have been a different story.
There was a lot of rivalry between the British and the American military forces throughout the war and that’s rather sad to me, and always has been. Even when I used to read war books as a boy that part always made me sad. All Allies are fighting for good against evil and isn’t that all there is? Who knows how many infantry men died needlessly because of some pride of nation or branch of service or a personal ego issue?
The jealousy and pettiness started at the bottom ranks and worked its insidious all the way to the top. UK Montgomery and US Patton had a big rivalry when they should have been co-operating in every way possible. Ike didn’t like Monty and only Alan Brooke liked Alan Brooke. Okay, maybe Brooke’s wife like him too.
WINNING IN TUNISIA
General Patton came in to replace commander Fredenhall on the southern front in the Dorsals. Fredenhall had been irritating everyone he dealt with since the day he arrived in Afrika. He was always yelling at people. “Fred” was able, but Ike knew that it was time to give him the punt. Ike asked one General what he thought of Fredenhall and the man said, “Fredenhall has to go.”
“Great,” said Ike, “you will replace him tomorrow.”
The man would not accept the post because it would be inappropriate, since his negative input had been persuasive. It just wouldn’t be right. Ike argued, but the General stuck to his postion. He could not snipe a man out of his job and then take it. Eisenhower finally said, “You’re right. I’ll bring Patton in.”
The US II Corps under Patton tok the Tunisia offensive in March 43. Patton was ready to make a smashing breakthrough to Sfax and the Gulf of Gabes, but the British punished the Americans for the crash at Kasserine Pass. Brit Harry Alexander told Patton to just hold a defensive position and keep the German-Italians boxed in while Montgomery’s Army rolled up the victory all the way to Bizerte and Tunis.
Montgomery and the Americans on opposite sides had about equal strength, but the US Army was spread out over a huge area while Monty’s six divisions were compact and therefore a better choice for the final offensive.
Rommel was sick as a Nazi dog and went to the Sfax airport on March 9. He jumped in his Sfax machine and flew back to Germany, leaving Afrika behind forever.
END IN TUNIS
By the middle of April the Allies had closed in on the last of the Africa Corps in Tunisia. The fascist fighters were boxed in around Cape Bon, Bizerte and Tunis (map.)
The final battle for North Africa began on April 23, 1943.
The US II Corps was too far south to participate in the final drive on Tunis unless some changes were made. Patton had replaced Fredenhall and was out of the fight. Patton was of course itching for somethng to do with his war machine. Eisenhower asked General Alexander the British field commander if it would be all right if the US II Corps slip through the other Allied divisions and take a place near the coast for the final drive.
Alexander explained why the logistical problem of passing several US divisions through the British forces would be a taxing nightmare on logistics. If Harry had let it go at that, Ike might have backed down. But Alexander had to add more insults about how the Americans had done at Kasserine and how he couldn’t trust them to hold their own, let alone lead an offensive prong.
This time Ike put his Army boot down. He pulled rank. Technically Ike was Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in North Africa, but Alexander, as field commander gave most of the orders and made most of the important decisions short of grand strategy. Ike was deferential to Alexander throughout the campaign (and Patton got angry with Ike for kissing up to the British too much.) Now he exercised his right to pull rank and send Alexander an matter of fact order that the US II Corps was going to pass though the British lines and take its place in the three country offensive towards Tunis from the west. Ike explained his reasoning to Alexander. The United States Army in training back in the states had a morale problem after what happened at Kasserine. The Americans were not a majority of the troops today, but they will be for the big invasion of the continent in a year or two. To make that future force more efficient and lively, a track record must be established for elan. They would toughen up, if someone gives them another chance, and what happened at the Pass won’t happen again.
Alexander didn’t have the option of complaining or arguing this time. Ike was explaining why he was ordering Harold to do this.
The II Corps performed very well in the final drive on Tunis from march to May 1943. Kasserine Pass was in the past.
BASE GUITAR AND LEAD GUITAR
The Nazis fought hard from their mountain base at el Guettar. Lead flew in a hot battle at el Guettar on March 18. This time the Americans won. Not by a lot, but the Americans under Patton beat the Nazis by about 45 to 35 tanks and by about 6,000 to 5,000 casualties. Plus the Germans fled the field. This made up for the injured pride of Kasserine, and it was maybe the first real combat win for the USA in the entire European war.
However, a week later at a second battle of el Guitar, the Nazis did better. The Americans lost far more tanks in Guitar II (the men of course nicknamed the place “Guitar”) than the Germans, but due to the overall supply situation, the Germans quit the field anyway, as though it had lost at Guitar II.
The British took Tunis 20 minutes before the Americans took Bizerte and the war in North Africa ended (May 7.) The Brits were supposed to take Tunis first and then hook up with the Americans for a united attack on Bizerte. But the 34th Division of II Corps took Bizerte way ahead of schedule.
The North Africa campaign ended officially on May 9, 1943. Von Arnim and his entire force surrendered. They had to turn over their weapons as well and were warned sternly that if they began to destroy any of their weapons the Allies would open up with howitzers like the battle was in full swing all over again.
The Herman Goering division held out a little longer after Bizerte and Tunis fell. HGD was holed up in a small mountain chain in between the two prized objectives.
The Allies took 275,000 prisoners, almost half of them Italian. That's more than the Russians bagged at Stalingrad. The Roman men were glad to get out of this idiotic war and go to the USA for some r&r.
German troop morale was shockingly high, even in defeat. The German PW’s (the acronym was PW back then for ‘prisoners of war’) arrogantly tauntied their captors that their defense of Tunisia had bought enough time for the Reich to counterattack and still win the war. Most German prisoners did not want to get shipped to America because ... get this ... they presumed they would be sunk by their own invincible and ubiquitous U-boats.
The Axis could have tried to save its men and material with a Dunkirk like evacuation but the risk was too high. The British Navy was off-shore in full force to deter any such ideas.
IKE AND VON ARNIM
Many high ranking Nazi officers surrendered. Rommel got away, of course. General von Arnim, unlike the uncouth cowboy Rommel was a Prussian gentleman warrior who though he would get special treatment as a PW. Von Arnim sent word that he wanted an interview with Eisenhower. Ike scribbled a note to to Arnim that read,
Mr. Von Arnim,
No.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower United States Army.
Most of the German prisoners thought they had won by delaying the invasion of Europe by a year or more. That had given Germany time to perfect its new super-weapons which would now win the war. These clowns taunted their captors that Germany will win.
ARAB VULTURES
Nazi and Italian battalions almost always had a pack of independent Arab opportunists trailing them. The poor Arabs would pillage the dead American soldiers.
Most of the the big towns on the coast were weather vane about the Arab population. The Nazis would pass through the conquered town and the people lined the streets and cheered. Then the Allies passed through in triumph and the Arab people lined the streets and cheered. Some of the people might not have been in both crowds.
THE BIG RED BULLY ONES
The made a movie called The Big Red One, and it glorified Big Red with worship. But no division is perfect.
An ugly affair took place a few days later when the effective but highly undisciplined ‘Big Red One’ the first Infantry Division went into Oran for a rest and relaxation visit. Instead of resting they rioted. What was worse they rioted against their fellow Americans. The Red One boys sought out personnel from non-combatant units such as MP’s, engineers, signal corps, and medical personnel and began beating them up all over Oran. The cocky Big Red One thought it would be fun to run around Oran for a few days and rough up anyone they could find that had not been in the front lines the last few weeks. The Oran rioting was a disgrace to the flag and the uniform.
SKIP IT - BATTLE OF THE BISMARCK ARCHIPELAGO MARCH 3 1943
MY FAVORITE BATTLE OF THE ENTIRE WAR!
Out of the Far East came news of a great American victory. Japan had been dishing it out for ten years. Now it was time to take it. The IJN sent out of reinforcement of eight transport ships to Lae in New Guinea. They were going to fight back at MacArthur there. The convoy had seven destroyers for escort.
Over the course of two days, land and carrier based US airpower sank all eight transport ships and four destroyers at a cost of six US fighters lost. Heh heh. The Japanese lost 105 planes, and 3,000 dead.
This Battle of the Bismarck Sea marked a turn of the tide in the Pacific.
The point of the Japanese convoy was to reinforce the garrison at Lae. New Guinea. They were going try to hold on to it like the had Guadalcanal. Japan knew that if New Guinea fell, then Rabaul would be next and then the United States would have almost cut off the supply line back to the home islands.
By now, US land-base air power was growing around New Guinea. Land based fighter bombers, plus B-24'S and B-17's took off from Milne Bay and Port Moresby.
The B-24's were fitted with two new types of weapons that proved very effective. One was the new nose. The standard glass nose with one machine gun had been removed and replaced by six small mm cannon bunched together for a good punch. Also the 24's were leaded up with bouncing bombs that skipped over the water and smashed into the side of an enemy ship. Both these weapons required a low level attack, and both worked very well. The cannon on the 24 noses shot up the Japanese transports and killed hundreds at a pop. The skip a rock bombs skipped right into the side of Japanese ships and blew up on schedule.
The Battle of the Bismarck's Sea was no battle, it was a slaughter on the lines of Tsushima in 1905.
EDEN SUMMIT 3 43
Roosevelt was not as adamant as his generals on the cross-channel invasion ASAP, but his White House Chief of Staff, Admiral Leahey wore down his resistance. Roosevelt trusted Leahy, and when the Admiral pressed the point with Roosevelt with conviction, passion and intellect FDR had to cave in. It was Leahy who finally brought the diplomatic might of the presidency to bear on the D-Day project. If not for Leahey, Churchill might have talked Roosevelt into postponing the D-Day invasion until 2003.
In March 1943 the British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden met with President Roosevelt in Washington. They had frank and important talks about the war and the world to come after the war. Frank talk means serious disagreements.
One of the divisive issues was colonialism. The United States was very much against the maintenance of the old European colonial empires in a post-war world, and this applied to Allied as well as Axis empires. The USA considered itself the runaway adolescent child of British colonialism. America since 1776 had always championed the cause of independence among the underdogs of the rest of the world, such as Hungary in 1848 and the new nations of South America in the Bolivar era. Just because the USA was allied with Britian in a war did not mean wit had to abandon Wilson-FDR opposition to British colonialism. (The left thinks that America is itself an historic and genetic colonial oppressor, and always has been, but that's another 15 rounds for another night.)
The British might hope that the good-will from the war alliance could lead to American concessions on British colonies but Roosevelt saw it the other way around. He saw the alliance as all the more reason the British owed US a favor, and could bloody well pay it back by granting independence to most of its colonial empire.
FDR wanted Britian after the war to give full independence to India, and to return Hong Kong to the Chinese just for starters. The UK was not hearing it. Churchill snapped so badly at Roosevelt one time over India that FDR never addressed the subject to the PM again except in writing.
Roosevelt hinted to the Indians that he was on their side in their fight against their British overlords.
This was not the only time in the war years that FDR plated a double-game with British interests.
LAY DOWN SALLY
The Tunisian campaign was a high water mark for WNAZ, the Nazi radio station that broadcast propaganda in English to American troops. The Yanks weren’t performing well and there was a pair American born “traitor-wench” Tokyo Rose type operating out of Berlin and Rome.
The German woman was “Axis Sally” who liked to remind the American troops that their wives and sweethearts, “Are at this very moment in the arms of another man back in the states while you sweat and die in the desert for the International Jewish Conspiracy.”
The Nazis were smart enough to realize that you need two spoons of sugar to make the propaganda go down, so Sally only spoke briefly here and there during a roll-call of popular American music.
Axis Sally began her verbal assaults on Christmas Eve 1942 and didn’t stop her air wave of garbage until the Russians took Berlin.
There was another woman who was known as Axis Sally but she was an imitation out o Rome. Rita Gina Zucca was born in New York City, moved to Italy in 1938 and renounced her US citizenship and taunted USGI’s on WBEN, Mussolini’s big brother station. The Italians made do do about nine months after the war for her fascist crimes of radio.
LADY B GOOD - A BERRY GOODE STORY
A story now from the North African desert campaign, a story with legs.
Maybe this is where Chuck Berry got the inspiration for his song Johnny B Goode. In April 1943 a B-24 Liberator Bomber, named the Lady B Goode took off from Bhenghazi and was lost. For years the LBG was presumed crashed in the Mediterranean somewhere. Then in 1958 the plane was found in the Libyan desert 430 miles south of Benghazi, and it was in almost mint condition. Some of the food was still edible. The crew was nowhere to be found. There were no skeletons. It was kind of spooky. Rod Serling wrote a Twilight Zone sci-fi episode about it in which the crew is still there but can't face the reality that they are dead.
In 1960 they found the remains of all bit one of the crew.
Chuck Berry wrote Johnny B Goode in 1958.
UNCLE JOE IS NOT HAPPY
It’s almost hard to believe, but Roosevelt was more distrustful of British designs on the post-war world than he was of the Soviets. He thought that the British wanted to re-arm France for selfish reason. The Dutchman was adamantly opposed to Britain retaining any of her pre-war Empire, as if winning a war one didn’t start should be grounds for punishment. Franklin always gave the Soviets the benefit of the doubt on post-war restructuring of the globe, more so than the English.
Whenever Churchill wasn’t looking Roosevelt would whisper to Stalin that he understood the special concerns of Russia better than the Churchill did. He told Pal Joey he thought that the age-old political fight between the Bolsheviks and the British had been going on for too long, as if the USA was never involved in that one. Churchill would walk back into the room and say “what were you guys talking about?” – “Oh nothing,” FDR would say while he and Joe exchanged a secret smile. Now this is only slightly a parabolic exaggeration. This is exactly what was going on in a serious way diplomatically between the three allies and it was strictly FDR’s fault. Franklin D had some important advisors importuning him not to trust the Russians but he blew their memos off as paranoia. Roosevelt believed in Stalin’s good will more than Stalin ever did. In his writing, FDR referred to Joseph Stalin, the greatest mass killer of all time, as “UJ” - Uncle Joe.
Stalin was livid for two years over the second front. He was steamed at the Allied decision to invade North Africa and Italy, as opposed to opening up a second front in France. By the spring of 1943 the western allies were battling 12 German divisions total. The Russian meanwhile were in a full scale fight with 185 German divisions. Stalin felt that his new friends to the west were trying to bleed Russia dry while they sat back and waited to come in only when the issue had been decided and the casualties on their side would be minimal. Stalin also feared a separate peace on the western front ( a fear shared in reverse.)
Stalin feared that Churchill and FDR might get a head start on the post war rivalry between Communism and Capitalism by treating early with the Germans for a negotiated peace, and allowing Hitler to concentrate on our common enemy, the Bolos.
But Stalin could not complain too loudly because he needed material aid. Lend-lease had already been given in large measure to the USSR before 12.7.41. Once the war started the spigot was turned on full power. So Stalin said some pretty rude things to Churchill and Roosevelt over the lack of a second front, but he didn't abandon the alliance.
Stalin never minced worlds. But he kept his cool while he delivered his arrows, which made them penetrate far better. The western leaders took the insults and moved on as if it were no big deal. In peacetime, many of Stalin's brutal telegrams and comments would have been an international incident, but he set an early precedent for blunt talk, and after a while he was so blunt, so consistently, that he was allowed the privilege. And besides, once in a while he'd make up for at by saying something positive and maybe even making a pretty good joke. Stalin loved to laugh and smile. It's pretty scary.
There might be some validity to the charge that Churchill wanted to sit back and let the Russian do all the dying. Churchill hat hated and distrusted “the Bolos” since November of 1917.
But there is no way that Roosevelt looked at it that way. Roosevelt admired the Soviet experiment.
Too bad if the Russians ended up doing all the fighting. You stabbed the world in the back when you made the pact with Hitler, swallowed Poland, and murdered 20,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest. You murdered millions of your own people for no credible reason, invaded Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Finland, and tried to occupy Romania. You had been encroaching on Chinese Manchuria since the 1890's. Who owed you any moral favors in 1943?
Americans are now supposed to admire the heroism and sacrifice of the Russians in World War II as though it is sinful to feel anything else. Russian individuals suffered through no fault of their own but the Russian nation suffered through its own fault. Reagan was right about the Russians in 1981 and he could have applied it in retrospect on the eve of WWII. Stalin's Russia in 1939 was as about nice as Sadaam's Iraq in 1989. From the time I was old enough to read WWII books, I have never wiped tears from my eyes admiring the Russian sacrifice in WWII. Yet an endless stream of authors tell me I must. Every network news piece I have ever seen on Russia's role in World War II is reverent, positive, and always omits the Russian crimes of World War II.
Millions of heroic Russians fell in battle, forcibly recruited by a bad cause to fight a worse cause. That’s tragic, but blame Joe, not my guys.
TRIDENT SUGARLESS CONFERENCE - DC MAY 1943
The military leaders on both sides knew by the end of April that Tunisia was won, and no one questioned that Sicily was next on the menu. The operation for the invasion of Sicily was code-named HUSKY, (named after one of Churchill’s old girlfriends.) The problem for everyone was what to do after HUSKY. Should major Allied offensive in the Mediterranean cease in order to garner all strength for OVERLORD? Should the Allies launch a full invasion of Italy to knock it out of the war? Or would that tie down too many forces that should be training and ready to go fort the big one, the invasion of France? The compromise think was for a limited invasion of Southern Italy only, or an invasion of Corsica or Sardinia. That was at least the more than a million troops in the Southern theater would be doing something besides training for some operation 14 months away.
All of these debates were ongoing amongst political and military Allied leaders, and it was agreed that it was time for another fancy conference to work it out and come to a decision. The first idea was a meeting of all the military chiefs in Algiers. Some of the top politicians could go too, but FDR would not have to appear in person. FDR heard of this idea and said no. If such important decisions were going to be made at Algiers without him, then forget the conference at Algiers.
Fred Leathers, the British Minister of Transport, suggested to Churchill that he should go to Washington with Ismay, Pound, Brooke, Portal, and Lashua for another big conference like the one back in December 41. Leathers told Churchill that he could charm FDR in person unlike he could in a telegram. Funny, the Americans felt the same way about FDR charming Churchill.
This is how the TRIDENT conference of May 1943 in Washington DC came about.
1943 was acronym conference year. There was SYMBOL, TRIDENT, QUADRANT, SEXTANT, SQUID, and EUREKA, all in one year. Several big books are available on each one, although the three volume history of SQUID, by Frederick Leathers is not exactly exiting reading, as that was strictly about supply problems (EUREKA in December was the big three meeting in Iran that included Stalin. That one does make lively reading.)
Churchill loved to find any reason to go to his mother’s homeland and when he learned that such a trio would almost certainly include a second chance to make an address to the US Congress, the bulldog barked yes yes yes.
Winston booked a five-start cabin on the Queen Mary to DC. He could have flown but he made up some excuse about almost being shot down three times in the last eight months while going across the desert, and not wanting to risk that anymore. But King Winston really wanted to relax and take a trip on Queen Mary.
When the Trident Conference opened, it was clear that this was going to be a little rougher than the trip over. Marshall and Brooke got into some heated arguments about wasting forces in the Mediterranean, the US doing all the hard fighting in the Pacific with too little help from Britian, the wisdom or foolishness of trying to conquer Italy, and who would command this or that operation. Hopkins even got red faced mad at Pound and Leathers over supply lines in Burma. Everyone was yelling at everyone while the press got reports that everything was going smoothly. But reporters could hear men being separated physically in the room, fistfights being barely avoided. Then the meeting would break up and the press release would take of everything being sugar and spice. But TRIDENT was a sugarless gum conference. No one was sugar-coating anything. At one point Marshall wanted to take all US forces in the Mediterranean and ship them to the Pacific! That was when Marshall had to be physically separated from Fred Leathers.
Things got so hot that FDR proposed that the entire conference get out of town and go to the president’s private resort in the Cacoctin Mountains of Maryland. Today it is known as Camp Davis. In 1943 it was named Shang-gri-La, after a novel and a movie of the 1930’s, and the Do Little Raid wisecrack in 1942.
With less of the argumentative military staff tagging along, the leaders went to “Shang” for a few days, and that did seem to make things go much better. The truculent Brit Fred Leathers was ordered to stay behind, as well as the petulant Admiral Leahey.
What partially saved the conference was word from Dwight D. in Algiers that he was all in favor of mounting some major offensive against Italy as soon as the Sicilian pizza was devoured. Ike didn’t make a full commitment to a full invasion of Italy, but his agreement on principle that the Allied force in the south central theater should stay and fight as soon as possible was much closer to the British TRIDENT position than the American strident position. Ike didn’t know that he would later change the name of Shang gri-La to Camp David.
The Russian problem was also on the agenda for the TRIDENT gumshoes. Hull complained to Roosevelt that Stalin was an enigma wrapped in a riddle, and that he couldn't get a read about Russia's post-war intentions. FDR told Hull to “get your own lines.”
Churchill told Hull that Stalin was going to come through and help the Allies in Asia, as soon as he's finished cleaning up his mess with Germany.
Hull then made quite the prediction. He told Winston that,
“If Russia should eventually come into the war in the Pacific, it will probably be two or three weeks before victory, during which time she can spread out over Manchuria and other large areas and then be assured of sitting in at the peace conference.”
That prediction came true in the summer of 1945.
FDR continued to hope for a personal conference with Stalin, with or without Churchill or Eden.
Roosevelt naive confidence in his own personal charm has been corroborated by almost every memoir of the FDR team. Roosevelt thought that he could break Stalin down by the force of his Dutch aristocrat grace and class. This pathetic confidence helped set back United States foreign policy goals in the latter stages of the war and beyond.
MISSION TO MOSCOW – DAVIES LIGHT'S STALIN'S PIPE – MAY 1943
They made a big hit movie out of it. They published a best-selling book about it. Almost every American in 1943 knew about it. The President sent former ambassador Davies to Moscow to meet with Stalin and to get a feel for the situation on the ground.
Davies, unfortunately, was there on a total kiss-up mission. He had no intention, no desire, and no capability of getting tough with Stalin. The red carpet is supposed to be rolled 100 feet out for the visitor. In this case the visitor rolled out the red carpet 6,000 miles to Moscow.
Words cannot convey the extent of the blind adoration for Russia and Stalin that was part and parcel of the Davies “Mission to Moscow”. The movie Mission to Moscow is on TV now and then. Tape it and watch it. You may be hard pressed not to vomit.
One scene says it all. A Soviet official is giving Davies the tour of the factory. Afterwards, he is meeting with Davies, who is listening in support while puffing on his pipe. Its a beautiful bond between these two old adversaries, now allies. The Soviet guy is proudly telling of all the great strides that have been made in Soviet production. Then he gets serious and has to sadly explain that not everyone is cooperating. There have been too many instances of ... well ... dare I say it.
Davies helps the poor man out by saying what the man cannot bring himself to say. Davies puffs on his pipe, gives the Soviet official a look of compassionate brotherhood, and says in deep sympathy as the camera zooms in for the close-up.... “sabotage.”
As if anyone in Stalinist Russia at the height of the war would dare engage in sabotage. As if one in ten million Russians would even want to. What would be their motive? Its preposterous. I don't buy it. You don't buy it. Davies bought it. Hollywood sold it. Most Americans in 1943 bought it.
The bogus charge of “sabotage” had been used by Stalin to justify the murder of millions of innocent Russian for 20 years. 99.9% of the time it was a contrived ludicrous charge. No tough smart democratic Russian patriot failed to see through the devious use of the charge of “sabotage” to justify murder or imprisonment of anyone it was convenient to murder or imprison. Only two people on the planet took the charges seriously, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Davies. Even Stalin didn't take it seriously, it was just a cover story, like Hitlers Polish soldiers who supposedly attacked a German radio station on the night on August 31, 1939.
If Stalin had a real problem with Russian industrial sabotage in 1943, then I am the King of Botswana.
GONE WITH THE WINDS OF WAR - JUNE 1 1943
One of the famous film actors of the time was Leslie Howard. He played Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind, the Ashley who couldn’t stay mentally married, but didn’t have the guts to technically cheat on his wife (according to Brett Butler anyway.)
Wilkes made war propaganda movies for the Allies and travelled often to neutral Spain during the war. The Nazis allowed commercial flights from Spain to Britain and back without shooting them down, a concession to Franco.
Late in May, the Allied leaders had a ten day pow-wow in Algiers where nothing much was accomplished, but Tedder and Ike and Win and Brooke and several others had a positive good time planning for future moves in a war that, at last, they were winning.
The Nazis knew that Churchill was in North Africa and had a pretty good guess as to when he was flying back to London.
In June 1 a civilian airliner out of Spain was over the Bay of Biscay heading north. A Nazi Ju-88 attacked it and shot it down like KAL 007 in 1983. 17 civilians dunked and died. The Nazi pilot believed that Churchill was on board, and he thought he’d scored one of the great military assassinations of all time, if not the best. But the Ju-88 had only shot down and killed a famous prime time movie star, not the famous PM. Leslie Howard, Ashley Wilkes, the greatest corn-ball chick-flick screen idol of his time, was dead.
As usual, there are so many debunkers that the basic truth gets caught up in the clogged sink of overstudy. There are entire books out there explaining what really happened. For example, Howard was a spy and the Germans were out to kill him specifically.
So maybe Churchill was not the target of a Yammamoto style take-down, but a very good book I am reading says he was, so I’m going with the standard version. The Nazis tried to assassinate Churchill in the sky over Biscay and instead they accidentally murdered the star of Gone With the Wind, Leslie Howard.
But ... If the story is false, then the co-star of the most overrated movie of all time died in the most overrated war story of all time.
THE RUSSIAN MILITARY FRONT 1943
The year opened with a great victory over general Paulus and the Nazis at Stalingrad.
The Russians were on the offensive on the entire front. At Kursk, the Russian armies advanced well ahead of the rest of the line and this set up a classic military temptation for Hitler and his generals.
The Kursk salient was a clear temptation for a decisive counterattack. It was textbook warfare planning. Pinch off the two sides of the salient from the rear and you can cut off and surround the enemy, thus turning an enemy advance into a clear defeat. The Kursk salient was so clear a target that one might think that it was a trap set up for the germans to fall for, but it just happened that the Kursk salient came into being as a natural result of the turn of battles. For once Hitler agreed completely with his generals. the Kursk promontory was the best chance they had seen in some time for a decisive counterstroke.
As July of 1943 opened the Kursk counterattack was well under way, but was not working. The Russians withstood the German attacks and held the salient while Germany expended more arms, men, material, and morale.
In the middle of this losing battle came the news that the Allies had landed in Sicily. Hitler had to withdraw many divisions from the Russian front just as it was collapsing.
Hitler may well have used Sicily as a face saving excuse to switch entirely over to the defensive in Russia, when in fact he would have had to even without Sicily.
The failure of the counterattack at Kursk in July of 1943 was a pivotal turning point in the entire war, at least as significant as the invasion of Sicily itself.
TURKEY 1943
Turkey had steadfastly maintained its precious neutrality for the first years of the war, but by 1943 the Allies were growing impatient for Turkish support and sent Churchill on a personal mission to persuade President Inonu to change his mind.
Turkey had signed a non-aggression pact with the Nazis in 1941, but had a defensive alliance at the same time with the UK. Turkey had a World War One complex. It had lost everything and gained nothing in a horror show that it didn't even start, and did not want to repeat the episode. Neutrality was a must. Besides, colonialism was almost as bad as fascism to the Turkish people, and most Turks had an antipathy for the British Empire and were not eager to join in any alliance with Union Jack.
In December of 1943 Turkish leader Inonu met with President Roosevelt and Churchill in Cairo. The Allies by now were clearly going to win the war and Turkey was almost ready to join.
Almost.
Inonu demanded as a pre-condition a large Allied armed force to protect Turkey from German invasion, and this he knew the Allies would not do. Inonu gave the image of wanting to join and made the Allies the obstructionists. He seemed to say yes but Inonu really said Inono.
The US was strongly against diverting any forces from the D-Day invasion forces already being prepared, and did not feel that Turkey would be worth enough on offense to make up for the high price of assisting it on defense. So Turkey snuck out of 1943 without joining the war.
Turkey waited until February of 1945 to join the battle. How convenient.
THE ITALIAN CAMPAIGN 1943
SICILY PLANNING
By the spring of 1943 the Germans had to know that a cross Mediterranean invasion was on the list of coming attractions, but the Allies hoped to at least keep them guessing as to where. Disinformation was sent out and maneuvers were run so that the Germans would think that the target for the invasion would be the island of Sardinia. This was a likely target. Sardinia would give the Allies close proximity to both Italy and Germany. The Allied Generals talked loudly of Sardinia whenever the local servants were in hearing distance. They knew the word would get out.
Eisenhower took the idea of invading Corsica and Sardinia very seriously. Dwight felt that if the primary objective was to make the Mediterranean secure for Allied shipping then Sicily was the best spot for the next attack. But if the idea was to conquer Italy and draw German divisions to the south, then the islands of Sardinia and Corsica would be a best choice. These islands flanked the entire Italian Peninsula, while Sicily flanked only the one lower corner of the boot. The two smaller islands were also less heavily defended than Sicily.
ITALY VS NORMANDY
The strident TRIDENT conference arguments continued on and on, long past the time when Pound and Leather went back to Picadilly.
Some American commanders favored the Italian strategy, but many did not. Back in the states Army chief General Marshall opposed the Italian campaign entirely. US General George Catling also would have preferred a total dedication to a build-up for the cross channel invasion that hopefully could take place in late 1943. But Marshall and Catling understood the reasoning and agreed in grouchy way to the Italian strategy.
In the memoirs of many Allied military and political leaders, drawing off German divisions from the Russian front is a consistent important reason for the choice of attacking Italy. If only Joe Stalin had known then what we know now from reading these intimate accounts of Allied strategic decision making, he might have felt less bitter. General Bradley in his memoirs insists that the drawing of German divisions off the Russians back was the number one purpose of the Italian campaign, (although Ike’s memoirs do not stress this as much.)
As for the desirability of a cross-channel invasion in 1943 or 1944 to try and win the war with a ground offensive through France and into the heart of Germany, this seems like the obvious course of action today. But there were so many options to those in the arena at the time.
First of all there were those strategic thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic who thought that the war could be won through a combination of air power in the west and a German collapse in the east. The thinking was that the strategic bombing campaign would reduce Germany to a negligible military power and we could waltz in across western Europe just when the Russians closed in on the east. This group didn’t even necessarily think that an Allied invasion from the Mediterranean theatre was essential to victory, let alone the D-Day across the Channel. The strategic air power group lost in the end but made a strong argument before dropping out.
What was up with the UK not wanting to win the war with a decisive invasion across the channel?
The British for the most part were simply not confident in the chance for success in a cross channel invasion.
Many Brits didn't even think that the cross-channel go for broke was absolutely necessary to victory. They were more than willing to consider other ideas to win the war without any famous D-Day. To the Americans this was unthinkable. To the mind of FDR, Marshall, Eisenhower, Patton, Hodges, and Bradley, the cross channel invasion was the only way the war could be won. The USA thought the Germans could hold out for years if it were not taken by direct invasion aimed straight for the heart. Churchill did not agree.
US leadership also feared that with the Churchill plan, the Russians might make a separate peace with Germany and leave us holding the war-bag as punishment for letting them do most of the hard fighting. Germany and Russia did have a track record of making slick and shocking political deals. You wouldn’t put it past those two to make a separate peace ending the war, just as they had bargained to start the war in the first place.
Russia was dropping hints to its partners that they were chatting secretly with Germany.
The British were forever nursing their injured pride over the dominance of American forces in personnel numbers and equipment. Churchill in his memoirs consistently has far more chauvinist pride than pride in the grand cause. The Italian campaign helped with UK morale. The British Armies in Africa were now free to join the fray and Churchill could point to an equality in numbers. Winston requested equal authority there accordingly, and he got it. So the British were put in charge of the entire Italian operation. Technically Ike was still the number one in command, but he backed off and let General Alexander actually run the war in Italy. The Yanks followed the British leader. Eisenhower was the executive producer while Generals Alexander and Wilson were the writer and director.
Before Sicily could be safely taken, the small strategically located Axis-controlled island of Pantellaria had to be captured (map). Even if the armed forces of the Axis were not a threat from there, the ability of Pantellaria to deliver intelligence about Allied invasion fleet movements made the little island a big thorn in the Allied side. Pantellaria airbase provided superb recce (slang for reconnaissance) to the Axis. The conquest of Pantellaria would clearly not be easy as there were no beaches to land on, only cliffs.
In late May and early June 1943 Allied bombers hit Pantellaria hard preparatory to an amphibious assault which came on June 11. British landing craft puttered towards Pantellaria. They were going to storm the cliffs. This was going to be Bunker Hill in the Mediterranean. Then, just in time, a white flag came up from the highest mountain on the island. The Italians surrendered Pantellaria. There would be no casualties incurred, unless you count the one British soldier who was bit by a jackass (true).
In Italy there was panic over the loss of Pantellaria, in spite of its small size. Although the new Italian Empire had been under counterattack for two years, this was the first time in all the fighting that the Allies conquered Italian soil. This was no longer close to home, this was home. The Germans on the other hand were furious over the way their ally had surrendered a tough position without firing a defensive shot.
The Allied invasion fleet sailed for Sicily in early July 1943 from ports in western North Africa. At the time it was the largest invasion fleet ever assembled on earth. The armada went in past Pantellaria and Malta and turned south as if heading towards points due east. This was to make the Germans and Italians think the fleet was heading towards an invasion of Greece.
BOND MINCEMEAT
A dead body further helped the deception. It is the story of OPERATION MINCEMEAT, or, “The Man Who Never Was.”
On April 30 a British submarine surfaced before dawn near the Spanish fishing village of Huelva and released a well dressed corpse into the water when the tide was coming in. He was Major Martin Olsen and he did as much to win the war as a corpse as any Allied individual soldier in life. Marty had on his person a letter from his fiancee named Pamela apologizing for her infidelity and begging him not to call off the wedding. He had an IOU for his bookie and a promise to pay off soon. He had a receipt from his tailor, and a letter from the Bank of England over a processing check. It was all very convincing. He also happened to have a classified letter he was supposed to deliver to Admiral Cunningham and General Eisenhower from the Chief of the Imperial Staff containing explicit details about the upcoming Allied invasion. That is, the upcoming Allied invasion of Greece.
The Spanish turned the body over to the Nazis who bought it lock, stock, and Pam. Hitler ordered several top German Panzer divisions to Greece to stop the invasion that never was.
The story became a popular book, The Man Who Never Was, and later on a second rate British movie (what other kind are there?) The whole idea of this elaborate deception had come from the author of the James Bond novels, Ian Fleming.
So when the Sicily armada seemed to be steaming for Greece it made perfect sense to the enemy.
Then the armada wheeled back and turned on Sicily.
SICILIAN D-DAY
On the way across the Mediterranean a moderate storm (called a 'mistral') came up and hit the armada, scaring the commanders, but not enough to call off the mission. The dice were in the air and there was no turning back. As it turned out, the storm gave the invaders the gift of surprise. The defenders went to sleep both literally and figuratively, thinking no one would attack in such bad weather.
The Allies hit the beach in Sicily on July 10 of 1943, the first D-Day, and the largest. There were more divisions hitting the beach in the first wave on 7/10/43 than there were in the first wave on 6/6/44.
The British under Montgomery’s 8th Army hit the southeastern corner while the Americans landed on the southwestern beaches to Monty’s left.
A parachute drop by the 82nd Airborne division was supposed to take the high ground behind the US beaches and form a solid blocking position against a possible Axis counterattack that could drive the GI’s back into the sea. But the drop was botched due to high winds and mistakes. Several drop-planes were lost in crashes. The entire 82nd division landed piecemeal over the length of the front and could not be employed as a fighting force according to plans. But the 82nd men adapted to circumstance and changed their mission from strategic blocking to tactical harassment. The soldiers took individual initiative and began cutting communications and destroying infrastructure ahead of US lines and in the end contributed significantly to the invasion effort.
While Monty fought up the east coast towards Mount Aetna and the pivotal city of Messina at the northeast tip, the American made good their landing and advance to the north and west. The US Army was supposed to drive up the center and cut the island in half while mopping up any Axis units to the west. But a portion of Monty’s offense decided to turn west towards Enna at the center and as a result blocked the US Army’s advance. The American right flank had to double back almost to the beach before it could move west in order to avoid chaos as it intersected with Brit forces. The spirit of co-operation enabled this problem to happen without rancor, and the US Army resumed the offensive due slightly northwest instead of straight north.
At one point the grunts were deployed in day and night groups so that the attack never stopped, the day-boys falling back while the night group filtered forward through their lines, much like 18th century British sharpshooter formations falling back to reload while the loaded group stepped forward to fire.
Patton and his big star buddies were miffed that the plan for Sicily called for the British to handle the more important fighting at the eastern shore where the better Germans battalions were concentrated. But not to worry, the war had a long way to go and there was plenty of danger left for everyone. The war still had 22 months to go.
Sicily was fully conquered by the end of August.
The two German divisions on Sicily fought well, but they never had much of a chance. Part of the problem was a complete lack of support from the Sicilian civilians. Italians had come to realize by this time that the best thing that could happen would be conquest by the Allies. Starting in Sicily, most Italians cheered while their country suffered defeat on the battlefield. Its a bizarre concept but it made sense under the circumstances.
BOOT LANDING
The Allies calibrated that the next step was to establish a beachhead on Calabria, the southwest peninsula of the Italian boot. On September 2, 1943 the British Army landed near Reggie Calabria.
The Yanks meanwhile made a landing at Salerno on September 9, about halfway between Reggie and Rome. It wasn't a glorious victory. General Mark Clark in his memoir, Calculated Risk, has a chapter on Salerno titled, 'A Near Disaster.'
The Americans thought they could sneak up on the beach of Salerno with a slick quiet landing in the middle of the night. They would be all over the German positions before Heinz knew what had happened, like the capture of Tico in 1775. Therefore the Americans decided not to hit the defenses of Salerno with a preparatory bombardment.
The plan backfired big time. The Germans were not only ready, they had not been softened up by the standard shelling to set up a beach attack. The US Fifth Army also ran into a water minefield they hadn't counted on and that set the schedule dangerously back.
The Germans hit the Americans hard all up and down the line when they made the foolhardy landing. The Luftwaffe strafed our guys badly. My grand uncle Charlie Hegrich lost his left leg at Salerno and committed suicide after the war in a fancy suit by jumping into Boston's icy Charles River. The Salerno beachhead held on but it was much too costly in light of the fact that the Allies had superior resources at its command.
ITALIANS SEEING RED
At about this time a few farsighted Italians were beginning to worry that the Red Army might achieve such a breakthrough in Southeastern Europe that Italy could be occupied by the Soviet Army before the western Allies got their military act in order.
An Italy living under Stalinist Communism would be the supreme irony. Fascism had risen in Italy on the wings of anti-communism. The “Black Shirts” were a direct response to the “Red Shirts.” Now the Communists might get the last laugh.
This was no unrealistic fear. The Red Army had occupied most of Austria at the time of the German surrender in May of 1945. Austria borders Italy. So many Italians felt that the sooner they surrender to the Brits and the Yanks, the sooner they get out of this war and avoid that train on the horizon blowing smoke and whistling, The Red Army Express.
Hitler fought hard to protect his ally, Italy. But he wasn’t doing it to save Italy. Hitler wasn't a selfless man. He fought for Italy to save the cities of the Reich from destruction from the air. Von Neurath had the misfortune of having to inform Hitler of the situation on the ground in Italy, how the local women were swearing angrily at German soldiers who were there to protect them. Many of the men in the Italian Army felt imprisoned in a deadly trap, fighting and dying for a cause they didn’t believe in any more. Many now claimed conveniently that they had never believed in it at all.
When it began to grow it’s African empire, Italy forcibly conscripted thousands of foreigners. Thousands of innocent Africans died in the ranks of the Italian Army in the Ethiopian campaign after being enlisted at the point of an Italian bayonet. Now the Italians were being forced to fight Germany’s war, and on Italian soil at a time when Italy wanted out. The unfair conscription of foreigners was now a boot on the other foot.
But Hitler was determined to keep the Allies at bay in Italy. He knew that he was next if Italy fell. Only Italy stood between him and a hangman's rope.
The Allies were surprised at the severity of the fight for Italy and by the commitment that Hitler made to defend it. The Allies correctly anticipated that Hitler would defend Rome and every inch of soil above it, but they did not expect Hitler to send crack German divisions to the lower end of the boot. But he did and the battle for Italy was so rugged that it’s possible that it never would have been tried if the west had known how tough it was going to be. The entire Churchill argument was that Italy was the “soft underbelly of Europe” and victory could be achieved through there. Churchill found out that Italy had abs of steel.
The German General who gets all the credit for the toughness of the Italian campaign is 'Smiling Albert' Kesselring. After Rommel, he is the most respected by the Allies as a reluctantly admired German war-maker. I've read his memoir. Sorry Al. If I'm a partisan sniper and he's eating a sandwich in my sights he's outa here. I won't admire generals who fought for the Nazis. I can, but I won't. I can forgive the soldier forced into service at gunpoint and oppressed in a cause he can't escape from. But a general? If Nazi Germany didn't include seven years of beating up Jews on the streets while the other Nazis laughed in the background before the war started, I might have a more open mind about the whole idea that military men are just tools of the civilian and are not entitled to political opinion. But the Nazis were so extreme and obvious that I can't cut their generals any more slack than I can their political leaders. At least Rommell got himself involved in the plot to kill Hitler. That would be the only thing that makes him an exception in my book.
There is little doubt that Churchill was more concerned with political angles than he cared to admit to his American allies, and that his insistence on an Italian campaign was not entirely about how much he trusted it militarily.
First of all, Rome was a great psychological prize, even though it was an axiom of war that destruction of the enemy's fighting forces, not its territory or capitol city, was the goal. Churchill wanted Rome as a “capitol” victory, a warning to Berliners that they were next.
Churchill had, as usual, one eye on southeastern Europe and the coming map of the post-war political world. If the Allies could take Italy, even if it proved costly, the good-guys would be in a position to protect or assault the Balkans overland from the northwest while Allied naval and air superiority would box them in from the Mediterranean.
Several forces unfriendly to Churchill would be Balkan boxed in. Nazis, Reds, and leftist Yugoslav partisans were all on Winston's unfriendly list. Unlike FDR and Ike, Churchill had to live in post-war Europe. The Yanks just wanted to win the war and go home. The Brits had more to worry about. They were in Europe, already home.
MUSSOS EGO TAKES A PLUMMET AT THE FELTRE SUMMIT
About halfway through the Sicilian campaign, Hitler called for his old axis of evil friend Mussolini to attend a devil's summit meeting near Venice to discuss the critical situation in the Mediterranean. The two dictators would pow-wow at the villa of an Italian Senator named Dory Cogliano at the little resort of Feltre.
That afternoon, Hitler did all the talking while Mussolini sat silent with his hands on his knees looking bored. The Duce was resigned to losing the war and did not have the drive or focus any longer to have a two way relationship with Hitler. Benito was also quite physically ill so he didn't have it in him to strut the way he used to even he chose to.
There were several key questions to be settled. Would Italy remain true to the Axis and continue to fight on, or stab Germany in the back and make a separate peace with the Allies?
Another key question was whether the Germans would send significant military help to save Italy. This led to more questions. If so, what type of military help and on what political conditions, if any? Would Italian leadership in both military and political affairs be respected if German troops and material came pouring in?
The Italian people had lived for two decades under an Italian fascist dictator. But it was another thing to ask them to live under foreign fascist dictatorship. The war was going horribly and they were hungry and under siege. Mussolini could pledge his loyalty to Hitler but he could hardly pledge the loyalty of the Italian people. He didn't even have that anymore, so he couldn't very well turn it over the the Nazi foreigners.
Mussolini went to Feltre wanting military commitments without political conditions, and Hitler demanded political conditions without any concrete promises of military assistance.
Mussolini was in no position to bargain. What he did not know when he hopped on the plane to Venice to meet with Hitler was that back in Rome he had been effectively deposed just a couple of days earlier. The King as well of some of Mussolini's life long supporters and aides were in on it. They all knew it was time for the Italian government to surrender to the Allies, although they tried to avoid that saying the word. The coup plotters were just waiting for the right moment to tell him he was a el dumped duce.
While the new Roman leaders were discussing who should tell Mussolini it was over, the Duce went off to meet Hitler and at Feltre. Benito basically acquiesced in the German takeover of Italy's defense. At the very least Mussolini at Feltre submitted a nolo contendre to a German option to intervene. If Cogliano and Petrocelli had acted sooner, and had taken Mussolini down before Feltre, Italy might have managed to surrender to the Allies before the Germans intervened in force.
Hitler promised Mussolini that Germany, would not stand by and watch Italy fall. But Hitler also spoke insulting of the Italian performance in the war. He let his partner have it in unseemly terms right to Benito's face. He suggested that the Italian fighting man was not up to par with the German model. Mussolini had to just sit there and take it. Hitler talked at the Feltre meeting for two straight hours. Adolph was determined that Germany will be defended down to the last Italian.
After the two hour lecture at Mussolini's expense, Hitler took Benny out to dinner for some easier conversation. Big Ben had taken his harsh lecture like a good subordinate, so now Mussolini was allowed to talk once in a while. Benito told Adolph that he didn't want to feel as though Germany was asking Italy to fight only to save Germany.
Benito requested that Germany send thousands of combat aircraft, but wanted no German troops. Mussolini wanted Nazi military might but no Nazi political might. Adolph told him that with the war being lost on all fronts, he could not spare an armada of Luftwaffe bombers and fighters to try and turn the tide of the war in the Italian theatre. If Germany were going to intervene to save Italy it would be mostly on the ground, even it would be against the will of the Italian people and the Italian government.
Only one man alone among millions of Italians was capable of committing Italy to sanctioning German intervention. Unfortunately that man was meeting with Hitler at Feltre and signing Italy on to another two years of World War II.
Just before he left for the flight to Venice and the drive to Feltre, many of Duce's top advisors and friends asked Mussolini to defy Hitler. They wanted Benny to tell Addie that the war was lost and Italy had to make a separate peace. There was no point in any further bloodshed or suffering. Tell the German madman that all was lost. They didn't ask him. They begged him. These Italian politicians had families. Their lives and the lives of their families could depend on getting Italy out of WWII. Mussolini listened to their pleas and gave them a blank look, a vague response and got on board for Feltre. He probably knew they were right, but he was committed to the life of a dictator.
But Mussolini was no match for Hitler.
For two decades, Mussolini had loved his meetings with Hitler. He admired Hitler and loved the respect that Hitler showed him. But it was different this time. In the past, Hitler could always buy Mussolini's political influence with flattery and show. Both dictators had played the part to the hilt in the good times. But now in the bad times Mussolini lost his desire to play the game while Hitler embraced it as another round, another type of vigorous glory. Mussolini was a broken dictator by the time he sat down for the ride to Feltre. Hitler wasn't. Hitler gave his buddy a dose of classic Ribbentrop diplomacy at Feltre.
Halfway during the Feltre lecture a messenger entered and bravely interrupted with a news flash. Allied aircraft had bombed Rome for the first time. Mussolini was hurt by the news and humiliated by its obvious significance. But then he was even more insulted when he realized that the Fuhrer didn't even consider this to be important news and went on with the lecture as if it didn't matter one way or another. Mussolini would have been less insulted if he had been insulted.
ITALIAN GOVERNMENT SURRENDERS – FALL OF MUSSO
By this time, Mussolini had only one friend left in Italy. His dog. And even 'Rico' tried to bite him when Mussolini offered him war ration dog biscuits. Everyone blamed Mussolini, and why not? Someone has to to take the blame. In Soccer you blame the goalie. In baseball you blame the manager. In football you blame quarterback. In a fascist state you blame the dictator. Unlike a U.S. President, who could blame every failure on the opposition party, Mussolini had to take full responsibility, since there was no opposition party.
But one was forming at last. With Sicily gone, Rome being bombed, and Italian men dying for Hitler on the distant battlefields of Russia, an opposition group did finally form, under the leadership of several rather important people who had once been loyal to The Great One. Chief among these was Marshall Badoglio.
The King of Italy, Emmanuel II had been a figurehead under Mussolini since the early 1920's but now the opposition decided that the King could be used to help depose the fascist dictator. King Manny was all for the idea, not so much because he wanted real political power, but because like most everyone else in Italy, the King desperately wanted out of this bad war. If the King had to pretend he was a real political leader for a few days to help Italy get out of the war, he was more than willing to do it.
Some of the opposition to Mussolini came from his own fascist party. The war was causing death and ruin everywhere. Political philosophy no longer mattered. Fascists wanted out of the war just as much as any Communists, Social-Democrats, Catholics, or atheists.
The trick now was to arrest Mussolini before he knew he was going to be arrested. If Benito knew what was up, he could flee and resist, causing a great deal of trouble. The King conspired with Marshall Badoglio (the hero of Abyssinia) to trick Mussolini into calling an emergency meeting of the Grand Council, the top cabinet group of the fascist party.
Since every member of the grand Party wanted Mussolini deposed, the King and Badoglio knew that the meeting could not possibly go well for Mussolini. But the Duce fell for it, called the Grand Council to meet, and began the proceedings having no idea that the real purpose of the meeting was to vote for his dismissal and arrest.
“This meeting of the grand Fascist Council has now come to order. The first order of business is the war. Does anyone have any suggestions on how we can turn this thing around? .... Well .... How come no one is saying anything?”
The King was in attendance, and was the only one whose position was secure enough for him to speak up. The King said that the Duce no longer had the support of the Italian people. Mussolini got mad and protested. The King told Mussolini that he also no longer had the support of the government, nor of the crown. Mussolini then threatened to resign, as if this were a legitimate threat at this point. That's how blind he was. The King gladly accepted his resignation, whereupon Mussolini took it back, claiming it was just a thought.
The King then suggested that Mussolini did not even have the support of his own Fascist Party.
“You're a king-sized liar!” said Mussolini. “The Fascist party cannot exist without me. I am the party!” Mussolini then called upon his Fascist officials one at a time to defend him. One by one they looked at their shoes in silence. Then it hit him like a ton of bricks. For him, the game, as well as the meeting was over.
The meeting was adjourned and the King reassured Mussolini that while he was no longer the leader of Italy, his personal safety was secure. The King would arrange to have Mussolini taken to a safe island in the Mediterranean where he could live out his days in peace and comfort regardless of the course of the war. The King also promised that he would not allow the Allies, the Nazis or the new Italian government to try him as a war criminal.
“Fine, fine,” said Musso to the King, “just let me go back to my place for some of my things and I'll meet you back here tomorrow.”
“Not so fast. Not so fast!,” said the King. He was not fooled, nor was anyone else at the gathering. Mussolini was dangerous and could easily strike back within 24 hours. The tiger of Ethiopia had to be permanently caged.
The King instructed Mussolini to cool it and save himself. “Conyo Benito. There is an ambulance waiting outside with your name on it. No one will suspect you are being moved about Rome in an ambulance. This will guarantee your safety. Take the protection I am offering you. If the news gets out about your deposition, you probably would not want to travel openly in a state limo, if you know what I mean.”
Mussolini had a sick feeling that the ambulance was not to protect him, but to arrest him. But what choice did he have except to hope he was wrong? He was not. Mussolini got into the ambulance and was placed under arrest and transported to a 'safe' location.
Everyone present at that meeting except the King did not choose to sleep in their own beds that night.
PISTOL PETE TAKES OVER
Marshall Pietro 'Pete' Badoglio took over the government and began negotiating for the best terms he could get. Badoglio was a long time fascist leader and a war hero from the Ethiopian campaign. He was a fascist to the core, but he was not an Axist. Bado was against the military alliance with Germany and had encouraged Italy not to join the war in 1940. This made him acceptable to the Italians in the summer of 43 from the King down to the cab driver.
If Mussolini had listened to Badoglio in 1940 the history of the war in Europe might have been very different. The terms of Italy's alliance with Germany did not require Italy to come to Germany's aid in the case of German aggression against a third party. If that had been the case, Italy would have had to join the war in September of 1939, and Mussolini and his advisors knew that Italy was too vulnerable in the Mediterranean to do that. The Pact of Steel was not etched in steel.
But in June of 1940 Mussolini could not resist the opportunity to jump on the back of a France lying in the gutter. So in June 1940, while the French army was being routed, Italy invaded the Riviera for some free loot. In stabbing France in the back (FDR's words) Benito lined up the Italian people up for death and destruction. In signing on with the Nazis for World War II, Benito sank his great political career and wrote out his own death warrant.
Italy could have held on as a cautious non-belligerent member of the Axis after the fall of France. Later, when the war turned against Germany, the Allies certainly (in a repeat of WWI) would have tried to court Italy into their camp. FDR and Churchill would have looked the other way on Ethiopia and on fascism and welcomed Italy into the Allied cause with open arms and a big 'Come to Papa' smile. Winning the war was paramount to the Allies, not the political philosophy of those who wanted to help. If the Allies could re-invent Joseph Stalin as the fabulous leader of those everlastingly wonderful Soviets, the PR department wouldn't have had a problem re-writing Mussolini. Italy could have come out of the war on the winning side picking up far more spoils on its borders due east in 44 or 45 than it ever could have due west in 1940 on the French Riviera. It might have even managed to hold on to some of its North African Empire. Mussolini might have remained the Italian dictator for another 20 years, and I might have watched LBJ attend his funeral on TV.
BOORISH BULLY CHAUVINISTS - (THE BBC)
The Americans and the British had finally won a campaign on equal terms. The ration of American to British troops in Sicily was about 6-5 in favor of the Americans. This was better for American morale than the 3-1 ration of British to American troops in the Afrikan campaign.
But still, commander Alexander had assigned the British the more important front on the east coast of Sicily, while relegating Patton and Bradley to the less crucial western and northern sections of the island, the areas less heavily defended, especially when you factor in terrain aides for the Axis.
But the Americans had fought hard and well, had beaten Monty to Messina and had exceeded their instructions in a positive way.
Yet the British press, both public and private, were taking many cheap shots at how little the Americans had done and how much the British heroes had done. I get mad reading about this 75 years later. Imagine how the Americans fighting and risking death in Italy must have felt.
The cheap shot British chauvinism climaxed on August 6 when the BBC broadcast the astonishing lie that,
“The Americans had it easy in the Sicilian campaign. While Montgomery’s men were doing the hard fighting, the Americans were walking through Sicily eating grapes and melons and drinking wine.”
Ike went to bat for his men and wrote Churchill a sharp letter about how disgraceful these BBC broadcasts were. They would have been inappropriate propaganda even if they were true. But they were not and Churchill had better take note and do something about it.
All Ike got out of this was a public statement from BBC program director Bob Dunnett that a certain BBC broadcast had offended some Americans, and that the program obviously “had been misinterpreted.” That’s like a spouse in the wrong apologizing by saying, “Ok, I’m sorry. I’m sorry you overreacted and took it the wrong way.”
Dunnit could have done it much better than that. Chauvinist Churchill could have ordered him to.
SHORT TERM SOLUTION FOR ITALIAN SURRENDER - LATE AUGUST
The Allies needed to get Italy out of the war and Italy wanted out as badly as the Allies wanted them out. But Italy also thought it could make a simple non-punitive switch from enemy to ally. That would not be so simple a matter. Italy could claim with some justification that it’s heart had never been in the war. But its bullets and bombs had been, and for British, Ethiopian, French and American widows, this was no compensation. The Allies were thirsting for revenge and issuing statements about unconditional surrender. US headlines were brutally celebrating any and all death tolls among the enemy. Rumors of the Jewish holocaust were floating. In the middle of all this, Italy, just because it had thrown out Mussolini, though it could switch sides with a casual yawn and change their A-team from Axis to Allies.
Eisenhower jumped the gun and offered terms for an armistice which included some political considerations. FDR and Churchill both jumped all over Ike for doing this. Eisenhower, who made it to the top by being respectful of higher authority, backed off and just said, well tell me what you want me to do.
The Italians sent two high ranking reps to Lisbon Spain to negotiate. One of them was General Luigi Castellano, a serious military leader. “Casti” knew he was risking his life. If the Nazis knew that Casti was in Spain negotiating with representatives of USA and + GB they’d make him RIP ASAP.
The British had a strong representative in Lisbon and the Americans sent the close deputy of Ike, Beedle Smith (pronounced like beetle bug.) Brigadier General Kenneth Strong spoke for Churchill.
Their instruction were rather sleazy. Smitty and Strong were to avoid any talk of an immediate alliance with Italy and instead offer preliminary terms for an armistice. And armistice only stops the fighting. It does not dictate any political peace terms. FDR and Churchill had agreed on these conditions for armistice and called them the “Short Terms.” They also drew up a set of conditions called the “Long Terms.” These Long Terms were short on mercy. They amounted to virtual unconditional surrender, something the Badoglio government had made it clear it was not about to agree to.
The Allied plan was to exploit the desperate Italian situation, negotiate hard to get them to agree to the Short Terms, and then when that got back to Rome and Italy was about to say yes, the Allies were to hit them with, “we’ve changed our minds - the Short Terms no longer apply. Now you have to agree to the Long Terms.” It was treacherous diplomacy. If the Allies just hit the Italians with the Long Terms up front, the Italians would never agree to them. It was bait and switch all the way.
These negotiations over Shorty Long terms went back and forth among several famous diplomats in several locations in Spain, Algeria, and occupied Sicily. In the end the Italians resentfully gave in and agreed to the Long Terms. But the Allies had to lie again to close the sale.
The Italians were properly offended by the bait and switch lies made in good fake faith by the Allies. They were cornered and they knew it but they made one last demand in exchange for abject surrender. The Allies had to invade Italy in serious force immediately. Otherwise, the Italians had more to fear from their German “allies” than they had to fear from their “Allied” enemy.
The good guys knew that the upcoming invasion of Italy was only going to be made with three divisions. More than half of the Med force was being diverted back to England to train and prepare for OVERLORD. But the Italians were demanding an assault of at least 15 divisions to reassure them that they would be joining a winning cause and would not have to look over their shoulder at Germans trying to arrest them or shoot them in the back.
The Allies lied and pledged a 15 division invasion of Italy in exchange for Italy agreeing to get out of the war.
The Italians were also supposed to sail their Navy into Allied ports immediately and fly all Italian combat plans to Allied airfields.
FORMALLY BOOT OUT
The surrender document was not formalized until September 8, 1943, but Italy had in effect left the war before that.
In October, 1943, Italy formally declared war on Germany.
American liberals were angry that the Allies had decided to work with Badoglio. Pietro had been a fascist from way back when and had led the wicked conquest of Ethiopia. The lefties thought it was immoral to allow this man to take over the new Italy with U.S. support. It was similar to the left’s reaction when America used Darlan in North Africa back in 1942.
When the Italian nation then surrendered unconditionally to the Allies and Mussolini barely escaped from Rome with the help of a dangerous cliffhanger of a rescue mission worthy of a Hollywood action film, Benito tried to hide in the Alps near Switzerland.
SURRENDER – SEPTEMBER 8 1943
The new Italian government was planning on surrendering from the time they took over, or really, even before they took over. But it would be dangerous for the anti-Axis rebellion effort and for countless Italians personally if they let the Germans know this one hour before they made the surrender public and official.
So the Badolgio “rats” (as some Germans later called them) had to even deceive their own military leaders, so these military leaders could in turn deceive their German partners. Meeting on military planning continued between Italian-German Army, Navy and Air Force commanders on how best to fight together to defend Italy from the coming invasion.
There was a spirit of co-operation between admirals and generals of both countries, a service loyalty that transcended nationality. This was not true of rank and file troops, it wasn't true of civilians, and it wasn't true among political leaders. But the Axis friendship between the military brass helped with the deception. Civilian leaders continued to communicate with Italian military commanders as though the fight was still on. They in turn continued to hold talk over maps in war rooms near the battlefront, and by this deception of one's own, the deception of the Germans was successful.
There was also a secret plan to have the Allies take over Rome in a lightning airdrop. Churchill and Eisenhower took the idea seriously and their commanders argued over it. The Italians even encouraged the German reinforcement divisions arriving in Italy to go as deep into the boot of Italy as possible so that when the Allies too over Rome, they could cross to the Adriatic, and establish a line of blockade across Italy. The Germans sent to save Italy would but cut off and trapped in lower Italy.
But the Nazis were wise to this possibility. The Italians had fooled the German military leaders, but Hitler and the political leaders at the Wolf's Lair were far more mistrustful of what was going down in Rome than Keitel and Kesselring. When the Italians announced publicly on September 8, 1943 that Italy was surrendering, the Germans occupied Rome forcefully. There was not going to be an Allied bonanza behind German lines.
General Kesselring wanted to believe that the Italians would not betray him. He had met with Badoglio personally a few days earlier in Rome. Badoglio had assured him with a warm smile that the new Italian government had every intention of continuing the good fight with its Axis partner. Kesselring suspected that the guy was lying through his teeth but he couldn't bring himself to accept it because what good would it do do disbelieve? He had to continue on with the war anyway as if the Italians were still with him, so he might as well hope that the Italians were still with him.
On September 8 Al was poring over maps with an Italian General from his veranda in Frascati, on the Calambrian peninsula. An allied air raid struck hard, smashing his windows in. The two men hit the floor then crawled off to an improvised air raid shelter. While the bombs were falling, the Italian radio announce that Marshall Badoglio had surrendered Italy unconditionally to the Allies. Kesselring looked at his counterpart as if to say, “Why you no good back-stabber!”
“I swear to you, Al, I had no idea! They told me just yesterday that the war effort must continue with all vigor. This is merely treason by the politicians. The Italian people are still with you.”
After the raid was over, a map was found in one of the bombers that was shot down. Marked with a big black X was the very villa where Kesselring was sleeping. The close hit on the veranda was an attempt to personally whack him. The locals were obviously passing along the information. The Italian could only swear to Kesselring that he didn't know. “After all, I was almost killed too. How could I have been in on it?”
That same day the Allied made a landing on the Italian mainland at Reggio Jackson at Calabria.
CAFE ROMA CANCELLED - SEPTEMBER 9 1943
One of the best Italian battleships ever built was the Roma. It was famous for it’s food, and was nicknamed the Cafe Roma, by the Italian sailors. The Roma went down in September 9, taking 1,342 men with it to the Cafe Depresso.
But this story has a twist. It wasn’t Allied planes, subs or ships that took Roam down. It was the Nazi Luftwaffe. It was the reverse of Mrs el Kebir in 1940. This time it was the Germans firing on their own Allies for deserting the cause. The Italians had surrendered on the 8th. The Italians agreed to the Churchill-FDR-Alexander stipulation that the Italian navy must sail out to an Allied port and surrender immediately.
Two Italians fleets took off from Italy and made a b-line for Malta. The smaller fleet made it to Valetta without a problem. The larger fleet, the one with two first-rate battleships did not have such an easy time of it.
The Germans attacked their former Allies with that special violence always reserved for traitors. They dive bombed and strafed the Italian ships like these ships were about to shell Bremen. The Luftwaffe decimated the Italian fleet. Ju 88’s and 87’s backed by Focke Wolfe 190’s sent the Roma to bottom and severely damaged severa other ships including the BB Italia.
This is one of the most interesting naval battles of the war and one that gets very little attention, and undeservingly so.
At least the Allies could feel good that the Germans hadn’t put these warships into action under the swaztika.
GIANT TWO
There was a massive attack planned on Rome. Part of the deal that the Badoglio leadership made with the Allies was to include this. The Allies were going to rescue the Romans from the grip of the Nazi mob as part of the payoff for getting Italy to quit the Axis. Part of the Allied attack on Rome was a planned massive air drop securing the airfields around Rome. Then the good guys could pour in troops and supplies to there. The dopey code name for the air-drop attack on Rome was GIANT TWO.
But the Nazis anticipated this move and beefed up the military forces around the airports. Ike and Monty talked it over and had to call G2 off. Badoglio felt betrayed, but in this case it was an honest renege on a promise, but not a deliberate deception (like when the white man would tell the Indians that if they didn’t sell their lands at unfair prices they would lose them and get paid nothing.) Pete Badoglio threatened to withdraw his public announcement of surrender to the Allies. If the Allies didn’t have to keep their word, neither did he. Ike was angry with Pete and told him he couldn’t withdraw his statements. Pete said he could. They argued like children. Badoglio left the building and Ike told his people to put Badolgio’s message of surrender on the radio right now. “Let’s see him so something about it.”
The OSS delivered a broadcaster whp spoke fluent Italian and could do a good impression of Badoglio. Badoglio surrendered on the radio while he was storming back to his room in angry defiance. When he heard what had happened, Badolgio acquesced in the events. He never really tried to retract the surrender of Italy. It just flt good to threatene that at the moment.
The Badoglio people thought they had been duped, but in fact, more than 70 planes were circling Sicily full of US 82nd Airborne paratroopers when the mission was called off at the last possible moment. The assault on Rome was almost a memorable espisode in WWII.
GRAN SASSO RAID – ACTION MOVIE – REAL WORLD 9.12.43
Mussolini was a prisoner and the apostates drove him from place to place to make sure no one could get to him. They didn't want the Nazis to rescue him and they didn't want the partisans to kill him. They wanted to hold on to him and make him stand for a showcase trial after the war. Mussolini was taken to Cosrica, where he may have chatted with the ghost of Napoleon, and then back to the mainland. Finally he was imprisoned at a fancy hotel high up in the Appenine Mountains.
Now we get to a character named Otto Skorzeny already had a distinguished career as a parachute adventurer, multiple ace fighter pilot, and all round James Bond. He was invincible.
One day he got a call to go to the 'wolf's lair' in East Prussia. He walked into the room and there stood the Fuhrer. Even the brave Skorzeny got weak in the knees. He never expected to ever even shake hands with Hitler let alone get a prive meeting with him.
The Fuhrer explained that General Student, the king of the parachute divisions, had suggested to Hitler that he might be able to rescue Mussolini. Hitler was all for that. The Moose was his good buddy and he had promised him in the 1930's that he would never desert him. Of course the main reason Hitler wanted to rescue Mussolini was to keep Italy in the war. Southern Italy was in the hand of the Italian apostate partisans, but if Mussolini could be installed in the Northern half as part of a Nazi controlled puppet regime, the Duce could still be useful.
Otto Skorzeny and Karl Student kept track of Mussolini's whereabout from Germany. They developed a rescue operation plan that was worthy of a far-fetched Hollywood blockbuster. Except it was real, and it worked.
The Skorzeny operation used several glider planes. The Italian captors never figured any planes could land in such a mountainous region. They couldn't. The gliders dropped the parachute guys out, then the pilots bailed out, then the planes crashed into the Appenine Mountains. The trooper with small arms and grenades stormed the hotel. The Italian guards surrendered without a shot.
Imagine Mussolini hearing all the commotion and then standing before him is Otto Skorzeny with German troopers behind him saying, “The Fuhrer sends you his greetings, Benito!”
Fighting back tears, the shocked Mussolini responded, “I knew my friend would never desert me!.”
The troopers made their way down to a valley where two very small unarmed Storch planes were waiting to fly off from the short and precarious take-off zone. They barely got off the ground, especially the one with the fat Dice in it (seriously.) His linguini nearly cost him his life in the last leg of the Gran Sasso miracle rescue raid.
Mussolini met Hitler back in Germany and thanked his friend profoundly. “You can thank me by taking over the The Italian Social Democratic Republic.,” said A.H.
“Sure, no problem.”
Mussolini was not stupid. He knew that he would have no power and that he was being used as a political figurehead to help slow down the Allied advance up the Italian mainland. Nevertheless it beat being executed. He was genuinely grateful for the rescue, and who wouldn't be?
The Germans made the most of the rescue. It was a doze of positive morale in a losing war. The made movies about it. Skorzeny had to recreate his moves for the Nazi cameras. The real John McClain had to act like Bruce Willis.
Skorzeny was tried after the war for going behind enemy lines in a British Army uniform. He was acquitted because the British had done the same thing and the Allies didn't want to have to try their own men for the same violation.
A CAVALLERO ATTITUDE 9-23-43
One day after the SS commandos rescued Mussolini, the Chief of Staff of the Italian Army committed suicide. Ugo Cavallero had co-operated closely with Reich Marshall Kesselring for two years and the two had actually become close personal friends.
When the counter-revolution swept Rome, the partisans arrested the Quisling Marshall Cavallero. Then the Nazis entered Rome and the Italian captors handed Cavallero back over to them crying, “Don't shoot! Don't shoot! We were only holding on to him until you got here.”
Cavallero was supposed to take a plane back to Germany for further instructions, like Mussolini had done. But he was afraid to return to the Mussolini puppet government because he had been conspiring against the Duce and he figured that his number was up as soon as he got back to Italy. If he had explained this to Kesslering, there might have been a way out, since overall he had been as loyal to the Germans or more so than Mussolini had been. But Cavallero was depressed. His wife was severely ill, his nation was crumbling and he was a marked man amongst Italian Fascists and Partisans alike. So on the morning of September 13 as a guest at Kesselring's temporary home in Rome, he went out to the balcony overlooking the city and shot himself in the head. There is speculation that he may have been murdered on Kesselring's orders, but I see no reason to buy that. The two had nearly crash landed in the Mediterranean Sea one night. They played chess and drank wine together. Kesselring had already saved his life, and there was no reason to save his life in order to kill him.
ITALIAN CAMPAIGN – A MISTAKE?
In choosing to attack Italy in 1943 it was factored in that the Italian people were sick of the war, had never wanted it in the first place, were more bitter towards Mussolini than towards Roosevelt, and would succor invading troops rather than try to stop them with suicide bombings.
On these assumptions, Churchill was correct. By the summer of 1943 food was short in Italy and German soldiers were getting first dibs. Nazi soldiers raided all the Italian chicken coops. Heinz and Werner ate all the sausage that was supposed to go to Gina and Luigi. The Germans were the hated ally. But there were two factors Winston did not correctly anticipate.
One; That the lack of élan among Italian troops and people was reduced to irrelevance when the Germans took over operations. Hitler sent in top quality armored divisions. Churchill expected second rate German armies. With the life or death struggle on the Russian front going on, Winston figured Adolph would not send his crack troops to Italy. The Allied generals also believed, along with Churchill, that the Germans would hold the line at the Po and would not send their divisions to hold the southern half of the Italian boot, but they did just that.
Two: The mountainous terrain of the northern half of Italy was more of a problem than was predicted.
Ultimately there was no great breakthrough to Berlin from the underbelly. By the end of the war in May of 1945 Italy still had not been fully liberated.
These criticisms acknowledged, the Italian campaign was a success in two key areas.
One; like the great Union campaigns in Virginia in the 1860’s, the engagement of enemy forces en masse was advantageous per se, even if strategically and tactically far short of brilliant. American industry and rebounding Russian industry were turning the tide of the war. The Allies would win a tie because a stalemated war between two giants becomes a war of attrition, and the Axis could never match the Allies in troop strength and industrial reserves. That had even been so at the fascist high-tide of early 1942. It was true that Germany was bigger than Britain industrially, but not by twice as much, and America was industrially almost twice as large as Germany. The Allies also had Russia’s endless landmass, China’s limitless rear and population, and the direct or indirect support of every other country in the world except Spain and Greenwich Village. The odds were still in favor of a comeback on the side of good, provided Axis scientists did not develop the A-bomb first.
The second major success of the Italian campaign was the establishment of several air bases in South and Central Italy. The base at Foggia was particularly important and became a main command center for the Strategic Air Command (SAC.) Now the US B-17’s and 24’s, and the British Lancaster, Sterling and Lashua bombers were close enough to pound German industry and volk around the clock. The Italian bases enabled the enormous and successful Allied raid on the oil refineries of Ploesti, Romania.
Most of the biggest German cities however were in the north and these could not be reached by the air bases of southern Italy, but with each advance by the Allied Army, target cities in the heart of industrial Germany were in reach of ruin from the air.
The main aim of the Italian campaign was to engage as many German divisions and air squadrons as possible in order to help the Russians, and to soften the Nazi defenses for the allied invasion of the continent. In this sense it (Italy) was a success.
On the other hand German Generals after the war claimed that the Italian campaign was helpful to them for the exact same reason! They said that by engaging so many Allied forces in Italy, the Allies were prevented from mounting major operations elsewhere, such as the Balkans, and had to postpone the invasion across the English Channel.
PATTON THE SLAP HAPPY GENERAL
A slapstick sideshow of some drama needs telling. General George Patton got in trouble during the Sicilian campaign when he slapped an American soldier in the hospital and called him a coward for not being wounded enough.
The flamboyant general was visiting a US makeshift hospital in Sicily. George Armstrong was pinning purple hearts on wounded soldiers in the tents when he came to one guy who made the mistake of telling Patton that he was there for nervous disorder. The pounding of the artillery had broken the young man down and he was in the hospital with a mental wound. Patton screamed at the guy and called him yellow and said, “You don't deserve to be in the same room with these other brave men!”
That was rough. But at that point Patton was not in any trouble, only the guy getting yelled at. But then Patton went on to another soldier in a bed who told him the same story about nervous exhaustion. George Armstrong strong-armed the guy. Patton just lost it. The four star General had a ten star snap. George picked the soldier half out of his bed and gave him two or three decisive slaps across the face, calling him a “disgrace to the uniform,” a “pathetic coward” and a “yellow-bellied snake.” The nurses and the other patients were astounded, to say the least; a patient being grabbed from his hospital bed and getting slapped around by a famous General. That wasn't something you see every day.
This was no love tap. Patton's smack-downs knocked the man’s helmet to the ground where it rolled to a stop while the soldier got more tirades about cowardice and manhood.
A few hours later Patton strolled into the office of General Bradley and casually remarked that he had put in a busy day. “I had to straighten out one lazy soldier, Brad.” Boss Omar thought nothing of it. Two days later the letters began arriving on Bradley’s desk from eyewitnesses describing the incident. They were not flattering to Patton. Plus it now turned out that the soldier that was slapped around was really physically ill with a fever of 102.
Eisenhower was the higher boss to Bradley, and they talked it over. Both Ike and Brad believed that Patton was in the wrong and should apologize to several groups and individuals or else be relieved of his command. The three men were all good buddies but the hour and the era required higher priorities.
On the other hand Ike did not want to lose Patton. He had a war to win and Patton was a fighter with experience who had risen through the ranks on merit. Ike wasn’t eager to decimate American Army leadership in order to teach one general a lesson about controlling one’s temper.
The story was an international news sensation and caused much embarrassment to General Eisenhower, commander of the US Armed Forces in Europe. This could not stand. Eisenhower called Patton on the carpet.
Ike told Patton, “We're friends George, but I'm going to do what I've got to do. I will relieve you of command if I had have to. You must apologize to that individual and to the entire hospital staff and to the entire United States Army.”
“C'mon Ike, you wouldn't do that. ... Would you?”
Ike just stared at him without a trace of a smile.
“I guess you would at that Ike.”
Swallowing his pride (an object the size of the USS Enterprise) Patton apologized.
Other war generals and admirals became household names from the war; men such as Omar Bradley, Bull Halsey, Leonard Sims, and Chet Nimitz. But no one was as popular as Patton. He was a star. Ike had to dig down deep to make the call on Patton.
Don’t miss the Oscar winning movie Patton starring George C. Scott at Patton and Don Knotts as Monty. Patton himself approved the portrait of himself in the film. The movie touches on the jealousy between Patton and British General Montgomery.
Patton reportedly said that “Scott played me better than I can.”
The Patton that led the Americans across France was not the same one that led our guys into battle in the North African and Italian campaign. The Mediterranean Patton made mistakes that were costing lives. He had no time to listen to details about logistics, how to supply his advancing troops or any of the many tedious matters necessary to maintaining an army. He only wanted to lead it into battle. He was the trucker who loved his job but never leaned the manuals or paid any attention to maintenance, and his truck broke down twice as often as the average driver and he got pulled over by the cops a lot for violations he didn’t realize he had made. But he was an excellent driver.
Many GI’s in the Mediterranean, soldiers doing the hard fightin for the US in North African and Sicily, resented Patton and thought he was arrogant. The big shot General would race through an armed outpost with a motorcade of jeeps (limos in that environment) in spick and span uniform with ribbons shining and flags flapping, leaving the dust to clog the men’s throats for the next hour or so. Some of the men loved him to be sure, but he was not the universal hero he was to become later. In 1943 a lot of grunts thought he was a big blowhard who made too many foolish military tactical decisions.
When the slap crisis forced him to apologize to everyone but the German PW’s George became a changed man. He still had the fight and the skills, but he tried to behave, because he feared the wrath of King Ike the Fair. Bradley later said that the soldier who took the slap in that Sicily hospital did more for the war effort than any man on the front lines! He tamed the wild beast General George Armstrong Patton. In political allegory, the sick soldier had picked up Patton and slapped him around.
AIR WAR EUROPE 1943
The B-17 was one of the heroes of World War II but it can be argued that it was one of the goats too. There was too much confidence in the B-17 before the war and even more too much confidence in it during the war. The United States, with British support, thought that the air campaign against Germany would lead to either German surrender or a Germany so beaten down that the invasion of continental Europe would be a cakewalk when it did come in late 1943 or 1944. Neither of these things happened because the strategic air war did not meet projected goals until it was too late in the war to be decisive. If they had to do it all over again, the Allies probably would have spent its resources in more traditional military ways. Most of the money for the war went for the bomber operations.
The two main US bombers that were supposed to win the war by bombing Germany into surrender or helplessness were the B-17 “Flying Fortress” and the B-24 Liberator.
The B-17 changed the way the military thought of war, a blunder of top proportions. Billy Mitchell is largely to blame. Throughout the 1930's as the B-17's were being developed and produced, Mitchellism was also being developed and produced. This was a belief that the old fashioned way of running a war would be counterproductive in the light of the new miracles of bomber technology. The American military think tank was divided between the squares who thought that the role of air power was tactical support of ground operations and harassment of enemy communication and supply, and the hipsters who thought that land-based long range mighty bomber power would determine the course of not only future battles, but the entire outcome of future wars. These Mitchell worshippers had some amazing visions of the future and felt sorry for those who were so behind the times that they didn't get it. But as time would prove, they were wrong.
The bombing campaign did not force Germany to surrender and the B-17 was not a miracle weapon. The 17 did not live up to expectations in any way, which is not to say that it did not perform well. The B-17 was a swimmer that was projected and expected to win six gold medals in the Olympics and when it came home with two bronze and a silver, the home crowd realized its error for betting the house on its winning the gold. At face value the B-17 was a war horse and war hero, but since it was supposed to win the war in Europe and hold the line in Asia, and did neither, it was a strategic failure, and in a large way, counterproductive in winning the war.
The nickname Flying Fortress was a boast. Air experts all appreciated the vulnerability of big four-engine bombers to fighter attack, and it was common knowledge that bombers should not go over hot enemy territory without fighter escort. But little fighter planes did not have the fuel tanks to keep up with the tanks of heavy bombers, so the bomber strategy could only go as far as the fighters could go, which was frustrating since the bombers on their own could go twice as far.
The designers of the B-17's in the 1930's thought they had solved the problem with a stroke of American genius. Eureka! How bout if we build a bomber that has so many machine guns on it that it can defend itself! This big bird will not only be able to withstand fighter attack, hell, it will knock half the fighters sent up against it out of the sky! My God, this is so exciting! The Mitchell worshippers were all over it for a decade, shouting down anyone who dared to speak out that this sounded great in theory, but might not meet goals when real test of combat came around.
Billy Mitchell is falsely credited for a genius and foresight that the facts to not confirm. If anything, his genius was a disaster that prolonged the war and killed a half a million people needlessly.
Mitchell gets credit for seeing that air power was going to win wars and they made a movie about him where he is the Jesus Christ of war-making if you'll forgive the irreverent oxymoron. Mitchell is Nostradamus. If only the pre-war planners had listened to him more, the war would have been won even quicker than it was. That's the message of the movie and the still prevailing myth.
The exact opposite is the truth. If people had listened to Mitchell less, the war would have been won sooner. It was Mitchellism that convinced the Americans and the British that most of the money for the war should be poured into the bomber campaign.
Now don't get me wrong. The bomber campaign did a lot of damage and it is idiotic to suggest (as some revisionists do) that it was a complete failure and that bombing actually increased enemy morale and power to resist. The destruction of German and Italian lines of communication, industry, supply, r&d, and food distribution, was hardly negligible. The bomber campaign was not a waste of time and effort.
But the war could have been won sooner if the strategic bomber concept had never been born. All that money could have been poured into landing craft. That's where there was a brutal shortage in 1943 and 44 at a time when the Allies were winning the war and could have conducted amphibious landings at points all over the battle maps of Asia and Europe. But the money was spent elsewhere. Both wars could have been sooner won with more ships, submarines and landing craft, when all the dough went to the visionary Mitchell cult of strategic bombing. Just a fraction of that money could have built 20 more carriers and 300 more submarines.
Only the atomic bomb proved Mitchell right, that strategic bombing could win a war, and he never included this in his preaching so even that proved him wrong. And by the time of Hiroshima, the war was won anyway.
Mitchell of the 1920's not only overestimated the bombing capacity and accuracy of the land-based bombers of the near future, he vastly overestimated the range of these next generation sky hawks. Mitchell advocated and predicted the mass use of land-based bombers only. He did not, as if commonly believed, advocate or predict the grand future role of the aircraft carrier. In fact, Billy Mitchell actually thought that the aircraft carrier was headed for obsolescence and that US gold mines should not be wasted building them. Mitchell argued that the range of future land based bombers would be so great, and their accuracy and firepower so fantastic, that the air armadas could reach any target with strategic aircraft while overflying and waving good-bye to obsolete carriers trying to put take tactical aircraft to the same target. 300 B-17's would laugh out their windows as the carriers took puny fighter-bombers on secondary missions. He was totally wrong about the bomber, and even more wrong about the carrier. Billy actually set back the carrier production schedule in the United States when it was desperately needed most.
Why build carriers if Jesus Mitchell says they will so very soon be obsolete? If not for Nostradamus Mitchell, the United States probably would have had far more carriers and far less B-17's on line when Japan struck Pearl Harbor and the Philippines. The Japanese wiped out all the miracle B-17's in two days. The Pacific War could have been fought on the offensive in a very short time if we had 12 Hornets in the Pacific instead of four. You can thank Billy.
Yet all you hear is the opposite, that Mitchell's visionary expertise on military affairs helped the United States win the war.
When Mitchell famously demonstrated air power in the 1920's by having planes sink decommissioned German battleships for the world to observe, he was using land-based, not carrier aircraft. He used high altitude big bombers against undefended targets that weren't moving. Big deal.
The experience of World War II proved that smaller fighter bombers were far more effective against ships than large land-based strategic bombers. BM's famous demo proved his visionary ignorance, not his genius. Mitchell was trying to show that high-altitude big bombers could sink a whole fleet of ships, thus making air war strategic, rather than tactical as it was in World War I.
When the Japanese destroyed the Asiatic Fleet at Pearl Harbor in was with close up torpedo attacks supported by mid-level medium altitude bombers with modest payloads. Even there it was the torpedo bobrs that did almost all the damage, one lucky hit on the Arizona from a medium sized Betty bomber notwithstanding. When the Japanese destroyed the Prince of Wales and the Repulse off Singapore a short time later it was with two-live-crew torpedo bombers again, supported again by medium bombers.
The Pearl Harbor attack force was all carrier based. The forces that sunk the two British battleships near Malaya a short time later were a combination carrier and land based, but even the land based attackers were small. The land based Japanese planes that hit the Prince came from airfields in Indochina and were not showing off much range in being there. When the USA sank four Japanese carriers at Midway, it was done with small planes launched from carriers, and a few small bombers out of Midway Island, the results hardly confirming the brilliance of Billy Mitchell. Throughout the war in Asia the carrier was king, not the big bomber. Even when Japan was near defeat, the strategic bombing concept was only beginning to get off the ground from Saipan, and the results were moderate.
Even the new B-29 of 1944 did not have the range that Mitchell dreamed up in the 1920's. And Saipan could never have been taken in the first place if carriers had not slugged it out to victory in the Pacific for the previous three and a half years. Mitchell gets all credit for the proven supremacy of the carrier over the battleship, as if that's what he was preaching all along. It's very annoying. Mitchell had wanted to kill the carrier program.
Mitchell's belief in the B-17 actually paved the road for the glorious string of victories for Japan at the beginning of the war.
In Europe, land-based strategic bombing was expected to produce fantastic results as early as 1942. It produced very little in 1942, a disappointing but decent result in 1943 and began to pay off only in 1944. But the time and pop lost from all that money and manpower going into these limited results was a military blunder.
The entire grand strategy was a failure even in success. The whole idea was that air power was going to switch roles with infantry and armor. The old school idea was that air power was the supporting actor while the ground forces were the star of the movie. The Mitchell cult said, “That's stinking thinking form the age of the dinosaurs. We're going to switch the roles if you can hold your breath long enough to grasp the exiting reality of what we're saying. From now on wars will be won from the air. The bombers will be the star of the show and the infantry will walk in for mop up operations after the strategic bombers have broken the back of the bad guy.”
But it didn't work out that way. It didn't pan out in Europe any more than it did in Asia. In the end the ground forces of Ike, Bernie, Brad, Charles, Omar and George Armstrong won the war in Western Europe after 11 months of very hard fighting. The story on the eastern front was the same. The bombers only helped.
The strategic bombing campaign was, in the final analysis, a remarkably effective tactical support operation, By the time you could even try to call the bomber campaign strategic, it no longer mattered. The Allied soldiers won the war the the old fashioned way, they earned it.
CBO
Now for a roll call of some of the major bomber ops. The British and the Yanks combined plans for strategic bombing was called CBO, Combined Bomber Operations. The North Africa campaign had set back CBO at least six months. In Africa bombers were being used as tactical support. But by June of 1943 the B-17's, B-24's, B-25's and A-26's were ready to drop.
For the first 12 months of CBO the main goals was to destroy the German Air Force, not German industry. That could come later, after the German D was wiped out. This was something like the instructions they give on airliners in case of oxygen loss for the parents to cover their own mouths first and only then put the mask on the kid. German air bases and airplane engine factories weren't the only targets but these missions had priority.
Target selection was always food for argument. After the war when German records were studied, the Allied mistakes were revealed. The Allied bombers attacked the ball bearing plants regularly, thinking this was a critical goal, especially at Schweinfurt. But it turned out that the Nazis were importing an adequate supply of ball bearings from Sweden whenever they needed them. The Germans were afraid that their electric plants would be bombed, and the Allies never saw the light on their importance. Oil refineries and gas lines were occasionally targeted, the major ones anyway. But a tragic number of oil and synthetic oil facilities were neglected as the bombers made second and third runs at already destroyed factory targets, or hit targets that were not essential, such as the entire city of Dresden.
But in fairness, the people on the spot were doing the best they could under the stress of the moment, without the gift of omniscience that fireplace eggheads later on are so fond of providing. There is no need to bust their ball bearings over their poor choice of targeting. If it had been up to me or you we might have thought that bombing Hitler's house in the Bavarian Alps should be the top strategic target.
The British were to do the night bombing and the Americans the daylight bombing. Together but separately they would reduce Germany to rock around the clock.
So it was CBO only in the larger sense. Up close, it was very much not combined. British and American bombers almost never were part of the same air raid.
On June 13, 1943 sixty B-17s dropped their cargo on Kiel. They scored a little damage but the Luftwaffe fighters destroyed a completely unacceptable 22 out of 60 bombers.
The next major raid came on June 22 against the Huls Brothers Rubber and Coffee factory in the city of Buna. 183 B-17's went in for the kill. This mission made up for the poor Keil haul. The Buna raid put the factory out of commission for a month and it took a year for rubber production to bounce back. The rubber shortage in Germany was at least as severe as it was in the USA. (There was also a battle for Buna in New Guinea in 1943.)
The weather from the end of June to the end of July was cloudy and stormy and Hap Arnold's bombers were limited to raiding Nazi submarine pens on the French coast, with little success. The pens were heavily protected with concrete. After the war Doenitz, in his book Sea What I Mean, said that the Allies could have easily destroyed the sub hubs while they were under construction, but that it was almost impossible after they were finished.
On July 24 and 25 it was the RAF's turn to drop off a message to Hitler. Nearly 800 Brit bombers hit Hamburg Germany hard, making life there at least one 20th as horrible as the Nazis had made life for all the Jews of Europe. Two more night raids on Hamburg came later. All told, the Brits lost 87 bombers to flack and Focke Wolfes and bad weather while broiling Hamburg.
The Hamburg raids saw the introduction of anti-radar tactics called 'windows'. These were thousands of little metal strips that were dropped out of the planes to deceive the German radar. The Windows operating system of 1943 worked much better than any windows I ever bought from Microsoft, and saved many pilot lives.
QUEBEC CONFERENCE, 8-43
They called it “Quadrant.” It was the major US-UK strategy conference after the fall of Sicily. The Russians were not invited. Churchill, for one, was tired of all the Russian complaints about the failure to open up a second front in western Europe. Stalin would have refused to leave Russia for North America even if he had been invited. Churchill commented that the British and the Russians were on “growling terms” around this time, which was at least slightly better than not being on speaking terms.
Winston left England on the luxurious liner Queen Mary, arriving in Halifax Nova Scotia on August 9 1943. The visit had been kept top secret. More than 3,000 Halifaxians were at the dock to cheer the arrival of the Prime Minister. The secrets to the nuclear bomb program were just as safe and secure.
The PM party took the train to Quebec and checked in to the Sheraton Citadel.
The conference was still a few days away so Churchill went south to Hyde Park New York to meet informally with POTUS at his pad. The August weather was hotter than a beachhead at a Churchill-planned invasion. Winston had to leave the house to sit on a bluff overlooking the Hudson just to catch a breeze. FDR had no AC.
FDR invited Harry Hopkins to the Hyde Park hangout because he knew that Churchill and the Hop got along famously from the earlier days when Hopkins was Roosevelt's unofficial but primary war representative in London.
Churchill was under the (false) impression that Hopkins was now out of favor with the President but was summoned to HP only to please the PM.
When the 'Kebec' conference began, the host Canadians agreed to stay out of it. If the Canadians participated, then other Allies would demand to be included, such as Brazil and the exile governments of Luxembourg and Norway.
Churchill and Roosevelt had many frank talks. ‘Frank talks’ means they argued. The key disagreement over what invasion route should be chosen for the main assault on Germany. Roosevelt favored invading France in the spring of 1944. Churchill wanted an invasion from the Mediterranean, up through the Balkans, a route he so often liked to call the ‘soft underbelly of Europe,’ perhaps because he subliminally knew he had a soft underbelly himself. This argument was left over from the 'Anfablanca' conference in January. It was still unresolved here in August.
The issues were essentially the same, and I'll refresh them here.
Churchill was more realistic about the nature of the USSR than was FDR. Winston felt that by his route not only could Germany be defeated, but the Soviet Union, the alleged Ally, could be defeated as well. By launching the invasion by way of Eastern Europe, the western allies could, as a bonus, secure Eastern Europe for democracy and prevent a Stalinist Communist takeover there. But Roosevelt did not have the same fear, hatred and distrust of the Soviets, and so was not warm to the Churchill idea. Roosevelt felt that the longer logistical supply route through the Mediterranean was dangerous.
Churchill pleaded that the amount of casualties that the UK would suffer in a frontal assault on the northern French coast would bleed England dry of her young men. Post-war London would look like Paris in the early 20’s, when tourists actually asked Parisians naively, “where are all the young men?”
FDR finally made it plain that because the US was going to supply most of the troops, and would make most of the decisions. I’m paying 90% of the rent so I’ll decide what color the curtains are, not you. Churchill's invasion by way of the Balkans never took place and it is a fascinating what-if of history to consider how the post war history of the world would have been different if it had.
Surrender terms for Italy were discussed. Mussolini had already resigned and the Italians were close to the end.
Portugal was on the agenda too. Frank and Win decided that it was now safe for neutral Portugal to acquiesce in the Allied occupation (temporary) of its Azores islands as a staging base for troops.
As for post-war plans, there was talk of dividing up Germany into several smaller states, but this was rejected on the grounds that this would give the German people an incentive for political troublemaking in the name of re-unification. Ironically, this ended up happening anyway between 1945 and 1990.
There was also a plan to create a German corridor that ran south to the Adriatic, so that Germany would reorient itself as a Mediterranean country, and not behave in such isolated troublemaking fashion in center of the continent.
Then there was the problem of the colonies. Not the Axis colonies, but the Allied. The United States had a Philippine complex. Just because it was planning on gradually granting full independence to its one true Colonial possession, the Philippines, the USA felt that England and France should follow the same path. FDR and Secretary of State Hull casually discussed various plans for the UK granting full independence by gradual stages to all its colonial states. Tony Eden finally snapped said hold the phone, you don’t really understand the great tradition of the British Commonwealth. States within it may aspire to gain considerable autonomy and perhaps independence within the Commonwealth. The granting of true independence to its subject people was not something they were willing to plan in a friendly manner with its US allies.
“SECOND FRONT NOW!”
The American generals weren't the only ones demanding that the Allies get off the barstool and get busy with an invasion of the cross channel coast. Many British citizens were calling for the same thing, and some took to making their feeling plain in any way they could. There were logistical problems facing the Allies for such an operation. Churchill felt that people just didn't get that part of it, and were too simplistic and emotional in their calls to action. He recalled the situation in his memoirs;
“The fools or knaves who had chalked “Second Front Now!” on our
walls for the past two years had not had their minds burdened by
such problems.”
I can just see Churchill in the back of the limo going from one place to another in the London area and seeing this angry self-righteous graffiti on wall after wall from Camdentown to Surrey. The slogan was a direct criticism of his personal decision making. This was a guy who was easily offended when a famous politician disagreed with any of his strategic thinking. Imagine how mad he got when he saw the work of punks defacing a perfectly clean wall with a chalked admonition to put out his cigar and get on with it. I keep picturing the scene and the faces he made when he passed the demands words of a chimney sweep with one too many warm beers in his belly telling him what to do. In a staid book Churchill's six-volume history, for him to use the word 'knave', said all we need to know about how much it bothered him. These rogue 'artists' probably had no idea how much the message got straight to the target.
BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC 1943
It is interesting to note that, unlike the Pacific, there was not a single great naval battle in the Atlantic Ocean throughout the entire war. The Bismarck vs. three British cruisers hardly qualifies. The Nazis had no great fleet like the Kaiser of 1915 did. The War of 1812 saw more surface to surface naval warfare in the Atlantic than World War II. The Battle of the Atlantic is not as thrilling a study as the sea war in the Pacific but it was certainly as important. If the U-boats could stop the flow of supplies to Europe, the War might end in a draw, which would have been to the advantage of Germany, since it was clearly losing the war overall by mid 43.
The battle against the U-boats was, quite simply, the number one priority for the Allies. Invasions were debated, strategic bombing was debated, China was debated, and even the nature of Stalin's Communism was debated. But what was not debated was that the biggest threat, the biggest chance for an Axis victory lay with the U-boat force of Doenitz.
In March of 1943 things looked bleak. The Nazis were sinking Allied shipping at pace that surpassed the ability of the Allies to build it. At this rate, the Germans could stall Allied offensive preparations forever. It didn't mean the Axis could win the war (some writers hint that this was so,) but it did give them a faint hope for a stalemate.
But over the next two crucial months of May and April 1943, the anti-submarine war of technology turned in favor of the Allies. Radar, sonar, longer range land-based bomber patrols, light aircraft carriers, and depth- charges that only exploded on contact all helped turn the tide. The Allies had an advantage in code-breaking and generally knew where the U-boats were headed before they got there.
By the end of May 1943 the U-boat crisis was over. 43 German submarines were destroyed in May. That was almost half of the entire Nazi Atlantic submarine fleet.
Over the last two years of the war German industry was still able to build more and better U-boats, but the momentum of the 'Battle of the Atlantic' was now with the Allies. The newer U-boats boats that came out later were up against a different situation. The U-boats, for all their upgrades, from now on were more the hunted than the hunters. Germany had improved its submarine offense by 50 points, but the Allies had improve anti-submarine warfare by 100 points.
The U-boat threat, even while being beaten, still hurt the Allies in an indirect way. The military leaders were begging Roosevelt to put American industry to work building big landing ships for amphibious assaults in Italy, France and the Far East. But Roosevelt and Churchill said no. After bombers, the biggest chunk of Allied money and resources would go to anti-submarine warfare. Destroyers and light carriers were (to name two) were deemed far more important than lightly armed landing craft. It was more important to protect basic resources from destruction than it was to reach out and touch the enemy far away. The shortage of landing craft plagued the Allies for the rest of the war. If more Allied resources had been alloted to landing craft instead of bombers and anti-submarine weapons, the war would probably have ended sooner than it did. By the middle of 1944 the Allies had the trained divisions to invade a dozen Axis spots around the globe successfully on the same day. But they didn't have the landing craft. If only a smug amateur historian had been in charge at the time with 20-20 hindsight, a lot of lives could have been saved.
THE PACIFIC WAR IN 1943
The Allies went from defense to offense in the Pacific in 1943. But the entire year was basically a slow switching of the two gears. The major concrete territorial benefits of offense really didn't take-off until 1944. It was like a person in an arm wrestling contest who was nearly pinned down and slowly came back. Now the two men were stalemated at the top, staring at each other, both red in the face with effort. But the one who had been behind was smiling and the other had a face fraught with fear. The crowd was stirring for the former underdog as the momentum was with the comeback kid. Both arms were locked at the top but everyone in the room knew who was going to win. That was 1943 in the Pacific. In 1944 the bully fell back and in 1945 his knuckles slammed back on the desk.
The American industrial machine was re-tooling itself for total war and the back story was all bad news for Japan in this sense. The Allies were just beginning to counter-attack on the Pacific map but the bigger story was that with the industrial mobilization of the great America war machine, Japan had little or no chance even if the United States chose foolish military strategic decisions. If Allied captains botched operational planning, these mistakes could have been overcome by the Niagara Falls of military supplies coming out of the states. Japan was in the opposite situation. If Japan had made one brilliant strategic military decision after another it still could only have delayed the final negative outcome. Their only hope was help from a victorious German ally, but Germany was beginning to lose its war too. The Axis was was still spinning, but it was beginning to spin off the table.
As 1942 closed, the rising sun in the Pacific had been halted at Midway, the Battle of the Coral Sea, New Guinea, and at Guadalcanal but the tide had not yet begun to flow back towards Japan.
The counter-attack began with the securing of Henderson Field for good. The Japanese staged a clever device for getting Dunkirk style out of Guadalcanal. Early in 1943 Japan sent a phony task force reinforcement mission with lots of armor down the slot. When this got the attention of the US defense forces they sent in transports to quickly get most of their remaining troops out of Guadalcanal. More than 4,000 Japanese soldiers were rescued to maybe fight another day.
The last Japanese troops were out of Guadalcanal on February 9, 1943.
PACIFIC STRATEGY 1943
Two-Front Road to Victory in the Pacific
Opinion was divided in Allied military circles on how to win the war in Asia. ‘Dugout Doug’ MacArthur wanted the main effort to run across New Guinea, up through the Philippines, and then on to a land invasion of China.
Others thought that the emphasis should be placed on an ‘island hopping’ campaign across the central Pacific straight to Japan, bypassing Japanese occupied lands.
It was decided to use both plans, but without the part about invading China. MacArthur would be allowed to roll up the New Guinea campaign, and then take the Philippines. That should keep him busy for a while. But the larger plan would be the island hopping campaign and the strategic bombing of Japan. MacArthur's south-central front would serve to draw off the Japanese defense forces, enabling the island hopping campaign towards faster victory.
The decision to invade the Philippines did not come easy. FDR, with the backing of some of the military chiefs, was against the early liberation of the Philippines. It would be too costly for the reward. The President felt that our little brown brothers could be safely bypassed on our way to Japan. Luzon Palawan, Samar and the other 6,997 islands could be hopped, just like Rabaul or Fukien province in China. Any non-critical target that slows down the operation will cost more American lives and lengthen the road to victory. That was the conventional wisdom, and FDR was right. The Philippines could be by passed. But the other side was should they be. MacArthur didn't think so, and flew to Washington to meet with the President and the military brains trust.
At this meeting MacArthur conceded that the Philippines were not strategically necessary to victory. But, he told Franklin, the liberation of the Philippines was morally necessary. These people were our wards. We had agreed to become their protector and friend in 1900. MacArthur then pulled out a piece of paper and read a quote in which Roosevelt a few years earlier pledged the eternal friendship of the United States to the Philippine people. FDR blinked in silence behind the frame of his burning cigarette. MacArthur poured it on, reading FDR's lines back to FDR such as “We will never abandon you.”
MacArthur paced the room and gave the speech of his life. “What was this war being fought for,” argued MacArthur, “if it isn't being fought for American values? And what are American values if they don't begin with our word as a friend? Do we let the Philippine people suffer another year under Japanese rule because it was not militarily convenient to liberate them right now? How can we let our POW's suffer any longer than they have to in brutal camps because we can't spare the time or resources to stop for them right now?”
When MacArthur was finished, the other chiefs of staff just looked at their shoes. Who could argue with that? FDR said nothing, which said it all. If he had any argument at all he would have let Doug have it with relish. Instead the President gave a smile and a nod and rolled away to sign the order to invade the Philippines as soon as possible.
The libration of the Philippines in early 1945 would indeed be costly. Many Americans died there and but many people were spared death because of that speech.
WAR PLANS
The two theatres were divided in command just east of New Guinea. Mac had the New Guinea side, while to the east Kinkaid controlled the Solomon campaign and environs. So near, yet so far away was MacArthur, who had to watch as the decisions were made in the central Solomon campaign and beyond.
The Solomon campaign after Guadalcanal is not a very famous part of WWII, yet it was the turning point in the entire South Pacific front. The naval battles off of Guadalcanal had been a slugfest, but a draw. Guadalcanal was just one island at the east end of the long Solo chain. The full Solomon campaign was the first mile in the march to victory, and it was a hard and slow one, the Kursk of the Pacific. It took the entire year of 1943 to secure the Solomons from one end to the other.
CENTRAL SOLOMONS CAMPAIGN 1943
The main target, the main prize in the drive up the central Solomons was the Japanese military base at Rabaul. It was the finest military base in the South Pacific and had been wreaking havoc on the Allies for the entire war to date.
Further out on the perimeter, the Japanese had built a first-rate airfield at Munda Point on the island of New Georgia. Planes from Munda were attacking the troops on Guadalcanal and shipping in the region. It was a pretty good location for an airstrip. Munda had to go. If the US could take it, then the US could take the offense and start raiding Rabaul with our own planes on Munda.
MacArthur and Nimitz Counterattack in the SW Pacific 1943
LIGHTNING STRIKES YAMAMOTO – 4.18.43
Before regaining islands America gained revenge. Henderson airfield on Guadalcanal was used to launch an important mission, the “political assassination” by fighter plane of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the man who planned and led the attack on Pearl Harbor. The US Army Air Force whacked IY on April 18, 1943.
The hit on Yamamoto was well planned because we were reading their secret codes all the time and knew that he was going to be visiting the home troops on Bougainville Island at western end of the Solomons. Isoroku was going there to help boost morale. That plan didn’t work out. Getting himself killed only lowered Japanese morale a bit further.
The US attack squadron left Guadalcanal 650 miles due east from the target. This hit squad intercepted Isoroku’s plane and shot it up, sending Yamamoto crashing to his flaming death along with everyone else on the plane.
The American military was in fact not certain it had killed Yamamoto until Tokyo gave his ashes a public funeral a month later. Isoroku's death was a psychological disaster for Japan. Yamamoto was a supreme hero and his replacement was not going to win the same respect even if they did an equal job. Yamamoto had the credits, to go along with the current job performance.
Halsey Bull’s-eye – P-38’s Splash Yamamoto
In recent years the 4.43 shoot-down of the Japanese Admiral has been called ‘controversial’ but it wasn’t the least bit controversial at the time. It is called a political assassination today but back then it was just a lot of smiling and jumping up and down and shouting ‘we got him, ya-hoo!’ Nimitz was grinning from ear to ear. Hull was high-fiving his wife. Nuns were breaking open 700 year old bottles of wine from the cellar. FDR told Hopkins on the phone that he was only frustrated because he “I wish he could get up on this table and dance a jig.”
It's unfair than to judge the actions of people who conducted a war by the moral standards of those later living in peace. Yamamoto wasn’t a politician, he was a uniformed military sailor with a lot of bars. He was fair game. Killing the Emperor; now that would have been assassination. Killing an admiral is another story. Every soldier in the 18th century was taught to shoot the most colorful officers. Were they supposed to hold their shot against Yamamoto for fear of being labeled assassins by armchair revisionists in the 21st century? This simple military strike mission of 1943 is now supposed to have been the first recorded political assassination in US history.
HOPPING TO THE GILBERTS
The island hop strategy was based on the idea that most of the Japanese occupied islands did not have to be taken by force. If select islands could be taken in a steady progression towards the Japanese homeland then eventually air bases could be secured from which a massive bombardment of the Japanese cities could be launched. The Japanese could keep most of the islands they had. We just needed to take a few here and there from which to bomb Japan. It would be maddening to Japan to have all these conquests and nothing they could do with them, surrounded and by-passed by armadas on their way to destroy their homeland. The strategy had not been foreseen by Japanese military strategists and so they thought that the war had a much longer way to go than it did.
The road to Japan had to begin with a breakthrough in the Central Pacific. From these bases, US air power could begin a strategic bombing campaign of Japanese industry and population. It was time to prove Billy Mitchell was right in Asia.
Revisionists now of course condemn the air campaign as ineffective and immoral but even of they are right, what is important from an historical perspective is that the large majority of military strategists in the USA believed this to be the correct strategy at the time. Who was against it at the time? The big four-engine bomber was a new invention, and who could blame the men and women of that generation for believing it could be the miracle weapon that won the war?
Who can know what is the perfect course until after the results are all in? So the Allies may have been wrong about strategic bombing. It doesn't mean it was ineffective, only that it's results were a disappointment until near the end game. It just means that other ways of using our industrial resources would have been more effective. War-long belief in strategic bombing when it didn't really work until the war was no longer in doubt anyway, was a mistake, but not a disastrous blunder. It just meant that it took longer than it could have. On the other hand, there is no doubt that strategic bombing severely damaged civilian and political morale in both Germany and Japan.
There were plenty of Allied tacticians who believed that a saturation air campaign alone by the 17's and 29's could bring the war to an and and force Japanese surrender.
The Japanese controlled lands left behind in the island-hopping campaign would be cut off from supplies and rendered strategically irrelevant. This strategy worked and won the war. When Japan surrendered, the bulk of it’s Pacific Empire was still under the rule of Japanese troops, much unlike the European theatre where almost every square mile of German held territory and Germany itself had to be secured before surrender was effected.
China was not an island yet it was probably the prime example of the island-hopping strategy. To sweep the Chinese mainland of Japanese troops with a combined Chinese-America Army was a serious strategic plan on the table for consideration but the better idea was to avoid the task of rolling back all the conquests and instead bring the war to the factories and homes of the Japanese people. When Japan suffered enough in its own back garden it would surrender and the occupation troops in China and in the hopped over islands would quietly come home to their families, needless fighting would have been avoided, and peace could be won.
The Japanese believed they had established a strong outer perimeter of central Pacific island bases with airfields. The chain of defense (Americans perceived them as a chain of offense aimed at eventual conquest of the west coast which was never really on their agenda) consisted of the Marianas, the Carolines, the Gilberts and the Marshalls. These ‘unsinkable aircraft carriers’ could hopefully survive attack and still remain strong enough to intercept and check and US naval forces trying to penetrate the ring of Japanese defenses.
But these unsinkable carriers were not invulnerable and Admiral Halsey believed that if he could assault these islands with Navy gunships, US Marines and carrier air forces with enough speed, he could take them before the Japanese could send a task force there in time to effectively contest it. In the meantime the attack would lure the Japanese forces far from their home for full scale ship to ship fighting in defense of their outer atolls, a prospect the United States desired very much. Once a Japanese island was secured, that outer base was converted from the red meatball to the stars and stripes. The airfields the Japanese built to defend its territory then became offensive assets for the American military forces use for attack against Japanese held territory. It was a giant board game.
By the fall of 43 Halsey was ready to crash through the Mariana-Caroline-Gilbert-Marshall ring. He now had ten large aircraft carriers and five brand new Iowa class battleships. Confidence was high.
The first counter-attack on occupied Japanese territory, the first hop on the island-hop campaign was a planned for the Gilbert Islands. Target Tarawa in the Gilberts was close enough to Pearl Harbor to make a good safe beginning for the offensive hop campaign and would draw a new counter-line in the sea from which Japanese expansion was to be halted forever. From these new positions, the US could begin air and naval offensives against the next closest objectives due west.
Two islands in the Tarawa Atoll were attacked on November 20, 1943. The Army encountered only token resistance when it took Makin in the Tarawas, but Betio Island was another story. It was the terrible fighting for little Betio that has come to be remembered by history as the battle for Tarawa. It took three days of fighting before Betio fell. On Tarawa the US Marines increased their legend already begun on Guadalcanal. One out of every six Marines that hit the beach was killed or wounded. But this level of casualty did not have to be. Several lessons were learned the hard way at Betio Island, Tarawa Atoll in the Gilberts. Their sacrifices paved the way for improved operational procedures later. Changes were made to protect our men better.
The Navy shelled the Japanese defenses at Betio for almost three hours. The Marines came ashore expecting little resistance, but the Japanese had been playing possum. They were dug in deep and survived that naval bombardment pretty well. They opened up on the Marines just as their landing craft were getting stuck on coral reefs in a low tide too far from the shore. It was a killing field and a lesson learned. For the rest of the war enemy positions would be advance-shelled by the navy for three days not three hours, and at close range.
The Japanese would have launched a counterattack on the first night but the naval bombardment had at least destroyed their communications and scattered their forces.
On the second day 600 more Marines made it safely ashore while over 100 more died and more than 200 were wounded. One guy took one in the chest, called out for a cigarette, took one puff from a friend, and died. Casualties piled up but slowly the island was being cut in half by the US forces.
On the third and fourth day the Japanese positions fell regularly to the Sherman tanks, flamethrowers and other weapons. Sometimes the bulldozer was the weapon of choice, closing in on a stubborn pillbox using the tractor blade as a shield and then plowing the pillbox under the ground and covering it with dirt.
YOU'RE GONNA CATCH HELL – 9-43
It was a sad day for Tojo when a new Navy fighter entered service in September 1943. What an upgrade over the old Wildcat fighter! The new Hellcat carrier was part of the reason the new Essex class fast carriers were the top weapons of the war.
One on one with a Japanese Zero, the Hellcat, I'm sad to say, was only about equal. The Zero turned better in a close fight, while the Hellcat was faster and had better armor protection. This was still a major improvement over the old Wildcat, which was no match for a Zero.
As casual glance the Wildcat and the Hellcat look like the same plane, but, like the current Super-Hornet vs. the old F-18 Hornet, the Wild and the Hell were two very different planes.
The Wildcat flew at 330 mpg, weighed 7,000 pounds loaded, and carried two 100 lb bombs, one under each wing. Wildcat had two .50 calibre Browning machine guns in each wing. Not a bad little punch.
The new Hellcat weighed 14,000 pounds, flew at 380 mph, and carried two 500lb bombs under each wing, plus a 2,000lb bomb under the fuselage. The Hellcat had either three .50 calibre machine guns in each wing, or two 50's plus a 20mm cannon in each wing. I'm going to presume that most pilots preferred the version with the cannon. The Hellcat could also opt for a torpedo under the fuselage or eight rockets under the wings instead of the four 500's.
The Hellcat was a better plane than the Zero because it was a fighter-bomber with far more offensive punch as well as being able to hold its own in a dogfight.
12,000 Hellcats were made in America during WWII. They shot down Japanese planes at a kill to loss ration of almost 20-1.
The Wildcat had fought the good fight in the Pacific War when Japan was ahead in airplane technology. Now it was Japan's turn to see what it feels like to fight with a quantitative and qualitative material disadvantage.
Nice looking pudgy plane, but I wouldn't say gorgeous. You want gorgeous? Try a Spitfire or a Focke-Wolf 190.
HARRY CARRY FACTOR
Suicide became epidemic among the island defenders. Hundreds of Japanese killed themselves rather than be taken prisoner. 'Preciate it.
Tarawa was a warning of the island campaigns to come. The Japanese soldier had no choice but to fight to the death. Americans were tough but these Japs were insane! To Japanese society and religion a soldier must fight to the death or suffer dishonor. Surrender, retreat, capture, a mental mistake, or even a decision that seemed wise at the time but turned out to be the wrong choice; all of these demanded one remedy in Japanese looney tune culture at the time. That was hari kari. Suicide. Disembowel yourself with a knife and if you were lucky there might be a pal watching nearby who would decapitate you. Since suicide was required if you surrender or retreat or get captured why ever surrender retreat or get captured? They fought to the death because the option was cruel violent death and shame. At least on the battlefield it was only cruel violent death. Perhaps equally important, most Japanese had been brainwashed into believing that the Americans routinely tortured their prisoners of war.
This is a rough system for the soldier. Was it productive? It inflicted the highest number of casualties on the enemy in the short run. But a soldier free to run away and live to fight another day may kill more of the enemy in the long haul. Suicide takes out many the higher talents in the ranks of the officer class. More men might want to join the Army voluntarily if surrender were at least an honorable option. As for surrender, the logistical stress of caring for PW’s will always slow a merciful nations’ military machine down significantly, so even in humiliation the soldier is hurting the enemy more than dying in a hopeless charge into a hail of machine guns and bazookas. In one suicidal counterattack on the third day at Betio 325 Japanese died compared to only a handful of Marines. In the fight for Betio the Japanese lost 4,600 killed while the US lost just under 1,000. The Japanese commander at Betio had bragged that a million man army could not take Betio in 100 years. The US Armed forces did with 1% of a million men and about one 40th of one percent of 100 years, OR whatever four days adds up to.
In the summer the Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska were re-taken from the Japanese after moderate fighting.
BATTLE OF BUKA ISLAND 11-26-43
Near Bougainville, the Japanese operated an airfield on the little island of Buka. The Allies saw it as a threat to their campaign for Bougainville and the Japanese appreciated the importance of Buka too. They sent a convoy of just under 1,000 troops to reinforce the airfield, in case someone got the bright idea to take it.
The Japanese headed for Buka in five ships. Three were destroyer-transports, two were full fledged destroyers. The US Nave sent a fleet of five modern destroyers to intercept.
In the battle that followed, three Japanese ships were sunk. The United States lost nothing.
This battle is usually called the Battle of Cape St. George, but since it was fought over Buka, I'm going to call it Battle Buka.
BURMA THEATER
CHINDITS
The situation in Burma was stalemated in most of 1943. The Japanese and the British both had plans to take the offense, but neither could devise a workable plan to get it into action.
The British settled for dropping thousands of troops behind enemy lines from the air and letting them to some serious harassment. These troops went by the nickname the “Chindits.”
They got their name because they took it on the chin the first time they went into battle. Of 3,000 Chindits that made the first drop, only 2,200 returned.
The Chindits operated mostly near the Chindwin River (which is where they really got their nick-name.)
More than half of the British operations in Burma were not fought with caucasian troops. Indian men did most of the fighting. They weren't quislings with guns, selling out their country to the Imperialist British. Japan was a serious threat to their country, and would invade India if it could and had plans to do so. There had already been naval battles in the Indian Ocean. So Indian troops fighting for the British Commonwealth were just as surely fighting for India. The same couldn't be said for Indian brigades fighting in Italy, and there were many.
The Indo-Brits tried to take Akyab on the coast in 1943, but the battle was a failure. The excuse given by British chauvinist historians (one irritating man in particular, I should say) is that most of the landing craft had been diverted to Madagascar, where the Vichy French had to be forcibly expelled. Of course, if an American battle is lost, no apologist excuse is given.
It seems to me that every general history of WWII covers the Burma theater poorly. The books treat it as a sideshow or they give a chauvinist account, based only on their own country's interest. The American authors talk about Merrill's Maurauders, and the British authors talk about the intrepid Chindits. Brit writers toss around words like intrepid and gallant when describing British deeds of combat, but when Americans do it they merely 'advance' or all credit is given to 'superior resources.' It's unseemly when I read it on either side. Japanese authors have an excuse towel long enough to land an L1 on.
The L1 was a small US aircraft that helped the Chindit guerillas. The intrepid American pilots gallantly landed them in many precarious jungle spots, defying near certain death in ways only Americans can. The British with their superior resources, needed to evacuate their wounded. They needed mobility on the ground to wage terrorist operations on a jungle map with any effectiveness, and wounded men slowed them down big time. The Chindits constructed ersatz runways in the most amazingly impossible spots. Wounded men were crammed into the tiny cockpit like a bleeding game of twister. One super-human American pilot made 18 runs in one day, on a muddy landing field next to a pond. The Chindits put bamboo and all sort of stuff down to keep the L1 from getting stick in the mud. To take-off, with only 200 feet of runway, they had to build a speed bump at the end to push the plane suddenly into the sky while everyone prayed it would get enough altitude as it climbed across the pond. every take-off worked by a fraction, beating certain death over and over like a Harrison Ford far-fetched idiot flick, except it was real.
HOME FRONT
LABOR AT HOME
The United Mine Workers went on strike in 1943 and this time they had little sympathy from the public, left or right. John L. Lewis the fearless leader of the UMW was not helping the cause of mineworkers or of labor in general, even if he did have the general support of the pro-labor president. American public opinion was rising against labor and letters from servicemen abroad were threatening in tone against the workers back home who wanted higher wages.
The reaction to this strike was the passage in Congress of the Smith-Connally War Labor Disputes Act in June which made it illegal to strike in any industry essential to the prosecution of the war. The workers would not get to decide whether their particular industry was essential to the war.
FDR was a friend of labor but not of Lewis. Roosevelt hated Lewis so much that he promised one friend that of John L. would promise to hang himself, he would resign the presidency in exchange.
The UMW strike created such a reaction against labor that it carried over into the post-war era.
FDR faced a political dilemma when the Smith-Connally Act reached his office. If he supported it he would lose the support of labor, so key to his New Dealer power base. But if he vetoed it, he would seem like he was not in tune with the mood of the American public and that he was not a friend to the men in the field who needed all of American industrial effort to keep it safe and supplied. Roosevelt vetoed the Smith-Connolly Act early in the afternoon of June 25, 1943. By the end of the afternoon the veto was overridden by safe margins in both Houses while servicemen on leave cheered in the balconies.
RACY STORIES
There were ‘zoot suit’ riots in LA in 1943. Mexicans, who wore a specially styled outfit called a ‘zoot suit’ had been accused of some scattered acts of violence in the city, particularly against some servicemen on leave. In response, organized bands of sailors and soldiers went around LA beating up Hispanic men and tearing off the hated zoot suits. Modern leftist history books give more coverage to these riots than to the six months of hard fighting the soldiers performed on Guadalcanal.
Racial tensions erupted in Detroit in the summer of 43. Riots between blacks and whites left more than 34 people dead, 25 of them black. There were a lot of war plant jobs in Detroit and the city attracted poor white immigrants from Appalachia along with poor black immigrants from the South, a volatile mix in any era.
A federally built housing development was ready to open late in 1941. It was named the Sojourner Truth Homes. But after a Congressman complained that Communists were deciding who moved into 'The Truth' a team from the Federal Housing Agency came to Detroit and looked around. They concluded was that only poor whites would be allowed to move into these buildings. The idea of whites moving into a housing project named after a black historical figure was a recipe for trouble.
20 Black families challenged this obviously racist ruling. With the backing of the Detroit Housing Commission tried to sojourn into the STH. White mobs blocked their entry with threats of violence. This evolved to real violence in the form of rock throwing. In April the Michigan National Guard protected the families at the entrance and they moved in to their new digs.
The racial tensions continued into 1943. Whites protested with vigilante violence when blacks got promotions in the factories.
The whole thing came to a boil in the summer heat wave of June 1943. Blacks and whites with no a.c. went to the river recreation area of Belle Island to cool off on 6.20. Lot’s o’ luck. One one particularly sizzling day fights broke out here and there all afternoon. At the dusk end of the long hot day thousands of people of two colors were meandering their way back into town across a narrow bridge. It was like two football teams after a brutal match who have to leave the field down a thin runway together. What could possibly go wrong? This time the fights became a full scale race riot. The brawling went on for hours and spilled into the mostly black Paradise Valley neighborhood. Buildings burned to the ground. Gun fighting supplanted fist fighting. Some innocent hard-working black motorists got the Reginald Denny treatment. They were dragged from their cars and beaten to death. In the middle of the night a rumor went around Paradise Valley that a black mother and child had been thrown off a bridge to their death. Now the blacks began finding white drivers and dragging them from their cars to die or get their skulls fractured if they were lucky. A white doctor visiting a black patient in Paradise Valley was murdered by the mob. The casualty list was competitive with the KIA tally from a day in Sicily. By the morning of June 21, 1943, 34 civilians were dead in Detroit and hundreds were in the hospital. Most of the dead were black.
News of the Detroit riot sparked copy-cat riots in other cities. Beaumont Texas pitched in with two more killed in action, one of each color along with 55 badly injured. Six African-Americans perished in rioting that broke out in Haarlem, New York. We were fighting Nazi racism abroad and looking like hypocrites mirror at home. Sojourner Truth was spinning in her grave.
ALPHABET WAR SOUP
The New Deal was famous for it’s ‘alphabet soup’ federal agencies and programs. The war had its own set of FDR pasta. An incomplete list (not in alphabetical order) included..
OWI – The Office of War Information, which was really the office of censorship and propaganda.
WLB – The War Labor Board – Created by the executive branch to avoid strikes during wartime, the WLB was decidedly pro-labor and actively promoted the closed-shop rule. The WLP was largely responsible for a 33% rise in union membership during WWII.
BEW – The Board of Economic Warfare, which was abolished in 1943 because of controversy with Commerce Department. The BEW was run by New Deal liberals with no sense of any practical need for compromises to win the war. It was authorized to spend an almost limitless sum of money for overseas projects, and it didn't require Congressional approval to make a move. Vice President Henry Wallace, a man far to the left of FDR (no mean feat) was in charge of the BEW. When Roosevelt relieved him of command at BEW it was a clear sign that his days as the VP were numbered, although Hank didn’t get it at the time.
OPI – Office of Price Administration and Civilian Supply – This wartime agency controlled (read ‘froze’) the cost of rents and the price of almost everything throughout the war. The administration was keen on avoiding a repeat of the severe inflation of World War One.
Farm commodities were the notable exceptions which often angered urban labor who felt that it was unfair that the farmers got to sell at what the market would bear while no one else could.
OPM – Office of Production Management – The agency in charge of national logistics for running the war. The OPM was abolished early in the war.
RFC – The Reconstruction Finance Corporation – The RFC was begun under the Hoover Administration and was basically a giant government lending agency. During the war the RFC concentrated on lending to new sub-agencies trying to develop alternative energy sources, with synthetic rubber leading the way, followed by petroleum and tin, plus many others. The RFC lent at least $2 billion a year during the war years, peaking in 1943 with 6 billion porked over.
The RFC worked closely with the FEA, the Foreign Economic Administration. These two agencies had more than 30 billion to work with on any given day during the war.
Headed by Jesse Jones, the Secretary of Commerce, the RFC had a long feud with the BEW, headed by Henry Wallace the radical VP.
WPB – The War Production Board – The WPB took over the duties of the OPM in mid-1942. Don Nelson, was named head of the WPB (his son Don Nelson later played for the Boston Celtics of the NBA.)
The home front was not good for many of the original New Deal Programs still hanging on from the 1930’s. The WPA was eliminated in 1943 as well as the NYA, the National Youth Administration, a pet program of Mrs. R. The old school liberals were taking a hit while the country turned right to win the war. Some history books blame the end of New Deal programs on the Republicans, combined with Southern Democrats, but FDR more than acquiesced in the liquidation of many of these alphabet soup letters going under. Franklin admitted privately many times that the country had gone as far left as it could handle anyway and even he was willing to slow it down. That was why Henry Wallace had to go.
NO SEPARATE PEACE FEELER SEPTEMBER 1943
There was little that Japan would have more liked to see than a separate peace between Germany and Russia in late 1943. Sure, before the war, the arch enemy of Japan was the USSR, not the United States, and Germany would have been doing Japan a favor if the Nazis had won its war with Russia in short order.
But a Germany slowly but steadily losing to Russia wasn't helping Japan one bit. Japan would like to see Germany direct all its might against the Allies in the west, not divide it between two fronts. If Germany could make a deal with Russia and regain the offensive in the west, then the Japanese might be able to regain the offensive in the Pacific. With America having to mightily reinforce its effort in Europe, the opportunity to recapture the Solomons and threaten Australia all over again might present itself.
For this purpose Japan sent an emissary to Moscow in September of 1943. If Molotov or Gromyko would consider his proposal his next stop would be Berlin to continue the negotiations. But the Soviets told the Japanese badwill ambassador that it was no deal. The time to make that offer might have been when the battle for Stalingrad was still undecided, and even then it's hard to imagine Russia entertaining it. By late 1943 Russia had the Krauts on the run and they weren't interested in any deal to let the Nazi scum hoardes off the hook.
Secretary of State Hull was pleased when Gromyko told him of the Japanese mission and of the Russian rejection.
MOSCOW CONFERENCE OCTOBER 1943
Secretary of State Cordell Hull was sent to Moscow to attend a major conference of Allied Foreign Ministers. Hull was thrilled. He had been usually excluded form major foreign policy decisions by FDR who preferred the advice of Hopkins and other unofficial officials to his own State Department. At first Stalin refused to see any American representatives, but when the Western powers promised a D-Day in the spring of 1944 the conference only then kicked in.
The most difficult issue turned out to be China. Hull’s vision of a post-war united nations organization was based on a ‘big four’ at the top of the heap, and one of the four was to be China. France was not to be included, which was always to Stalin’s liking. But Stalin preferred a big three concept of the USSR, US, and UK, the Triple U. Molotov pointed out that if the US and UK tried to lead the organization in condominium it would spell ‘USUK.’ Hull did not laugh at Vyacheslav’s little acronym joke, but did marvel at Molotov’s command of English slang. From then on many officials off the record used USUK to describe the special relationship between the USA and the UK.
Hull got tough on the inclusion of China, more than Roosevelt would have. The Russians conceded the granting of post-war star status to China, even though China had been bullied around by every industrialized nation on earth for almost 100 years now and counting. Japan had nearly conquered China, even though Japan had one twentieth the population. Half of China was under Japanese occupation and there was no sign of a major Chinese counterattack. Yet the middle kingdom was to be treated like it had stood tall in the military alliance.
Stalin pledged to Hull that after Germany was defeated, Russia would declare war on Japan and help US-UK win the Pacific war. FDR wanted this desperately, and I wish he had never wanted it at all. By the time Russia piled on, Japan was prostrate, the USA had the nuclear bomb, and Stalin just joined in to grab some spoils like Mussolini in June 1940 when he pulled out the dagger to stab the frog.
Hull went before Congress in early November and reported ecstatically that after the fighting stops the new world will be free of any balance of power politics or spheres of influence. Cordell Hull was evidently even more naïve than Roosevelt, if that is possible.
Congress gave him a standing Ovation.
BOOKWORMS/ ONE WILKIE WORLD 1943
The hot non-fiction bestseller of 1943 was One World, a naïve visionary vision of the post war new world order written by the losing candidate for the presidency on 1940, Wendell Wilkie.
Wilkie was the RINO of his time, that is, a ‘Republican in name only.’ His political views were more New Deal than most of the Democrats in the Roosevelt Administration. Wilkie not only believed in the liberal utopian ideals of the New Deal, he wanted it spread to the entire world after the Allies won the war, hence the title of his book which sold over a million copies in less than two months. I’ve had One World in my library for 25 years, but haven't read 30 pages. It’s just a little too airy for my taste, based on several browsing sessions without a pen or bookmark.
Wilkie took an around the one world tour in 1943, promoting his dream and the book, while obviously lining himself up for a run at the White House in 44.
When he was in China he was hanging out with the wife of Chiang Kai-Shek a little too often and the press began to wonder if he wasn’t sharing one hotel room with the lovely Madame. Wilkie also had a drinking problem that FDR liked to poke fun at for political gain. Roosevelt told a gang of friendly reporters a contrived story,
“I heard that Wilkie had a bottle of whiskey in his back pocket the other day when he fell flat on his rear end. When he got up he felt liquid running down his leg and exclaimed, ‘please dear God, let it be blood.’ ”
CAIRO CONFERENCE NOVEMBER 1943
Before the big meeting in Iran with Stalin, the British and the Americans held their own summit conference in Cairo Egypt (as opposed to Cairo, Ecuador.) FDR and Churchill were there and the top brass on both sides joined them. There were a lot of “frank” discussions. That means things got hot.
At one point the two sides were arguing about where the landing craft would go. Would it all be saved for Overlord? Would some go to Churchill’s plans to invade the eastern Mediterranean? How many landing craft would be saved for further operations in Italy and Southern France?
Vinegar Joe Stilwell was there in Cairo and he and Sir Alan Snoot Brooke got into “quite a row” over Brooke’s suggestion that maybe the landing craft in the CBA-Burma region should be taken out of there and go to Europe for Overlord. Admiral King hit the roof and defended the need for the LST’s in Burma. King was defending Stilwell. At one point, by some accounts Brooke and King were within and instant of a real physical fight. Stilwell wrote alter that, “How I was hoping that King would sock him right in the nose like Cagney.”
It had got that close.
Churchill and his grand plan to invade the Balkans and the Island of Rhodes near Greece, or some other island or two near Turkey, was another main point of discussion/argument. Ike Marshall and others were just totally against it, per se. The Americans were focused in winning the war arm in arm with the Russians, while Churchill was thinking in terms of strong-arming the Russians before they did it to the West in the near east.
Churchill and others in the UK cloud thought that they could still entice Turkey to join the war on the side of the Allies. That was half the reason for the invasion plans for Rhodes and other spots in the Dedocanese Islands. That was much of Churchill’s argument. Landing craft and planes and troops that bring Turkey into the war would be more than cost effective. Winnie was just naive about that part. You can make a good argument for some of his reasoning, but as far as enticing Turkey into the war, he was dreaming the dream of open-mikers driving to California to star in a sit-com. It wasn’t happening, but try telling him that.
The Americans proposed an invasion of Sardinia, the island next to Nap’s Corsica off the southeast coast of France. Churchill tried to be witty and said that “I am not going to be distracted by a pack of sardines!” No one laughed at the stupid joke, but he made the same crack every time someone mentioned the idea of invading Sardinia. At leas e stand-up’s know when to drop a joke.
It wasn’t easy to dissuade Churchill from his east Mediterranean goals, but in the end the Prime Minister backed off and the dream died at Cairo tables. The big brass met in Cairo both before and after the meeting in Iran.
TEHERAN 12 1943
The Foreign Ministers Conference in Moscow was just a warm-up act for the big three meeting in Iran between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin in December, the famous Teheran Conference.
Roosevelt had resisted traveling far to meet with Stalin, protesting that being that far away would ruin his ability to work with Congress on Bills and other things. But Stalin insisted that his battlefield situation was so critical that he could not travel from the motherland. FDR finally decided to go to Teheran with Churchill to meet with Stalin at Teheran, Iran. This very historic conference lasted from November 28 to December 1 1943.
Roosevelt had a problematic confidence in his ability to charm, persuade and awe people. FD was sure that he could work with Stalin far better than Churchill could. He told the British leaders that Stalin hated their guts, but that Uncle Joe liked him much better. He was going to charm the mustache off of Stalin at Teheran.
Stalin won his maximal goals at Teheran. FDR and Churchill did not even win their minimal goals. For Russians, the Teheran Conference was the Stalingrad of foreign relations.
Stalin was many bad things but he was a good negotiator. He was also experienced, compared to Roosevelt. Stalin had already negotiated deals with Hitler and Tojo. He wasn’t really about to be bedazzled by the charms of Roosevelt, but there was no explaining this to Roosevelt.
Stalin won back at Teheran, the same basic territorial concessions he had won from Hitler in 1939, namely the Baltic states, eastern Poland and northeastern Romania. Russia had already existed for and year and a half with these prizes and now wanted them back. Hitler had of course reneged on the property sales and foreclosed by invasion. Now Stalin was winning the deeds back, this time in a military battle. This time Joseph wanted the official sanction of his powerful and respected western allies. That would put him in better control than 1939. This issue was not resolved and was postponed for Yalta. The fact that he had owned them through the devil in the first place didn’t bother the USSR, and it didn’t bother the US and the UK enough.
The differences between Britian and the US were in evidence and exploited by Stalin both at high political strategic levels and at simple personal ones too. Stalin would sneak in a little dig at Churchill and throw a smiling glance at Roosevelt who gave Joseph the same knowing look at Winston’s expense. Yes, FDR and Stalin punked Churchill at Teheran. At one point, when Churchill’s back was turned, FDR hit him with a spitball fired from his cigarette holder. Stalin nearly cried trying not to laugh out loud. The same sad behavior would prevail it Yalta the next year.
During one session Stalin said that one of the first orders of business after the war should be to round up 50,000 German officers and have them liquidated. Churchill was aghast. Another voice chimed in. It was FDR’s son. He boldly gave a short emotional talk in favor of Stalin’s ruthless suggestion. Churchill got up in protest and, with a pithy remark condemning mass murder, walked out of the meeting. Stalin got up and chased him down, putting his hands on Winstons’ shoulders from behind, and told him that of course he was just joking around. He wasn’t seriously suggesting he wanted to shoot all those officers and politicians. Churchill was assuaged and returned to the discussion. Then FDR tried levity. He suggested that Stalin’s idea was indeed too brutal to be taken seriously. It would be better, suggested Roosevelt, if we only liquidated 49,000 Nazis. Stalin laughed while Churchill frowned.
Stalin got steamed when the subject of the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia came up. He said that these nations had voted of their own free will to join the USSR when they had the opportunity to do so in 1940. Roosevelt said nothing and suddenly had to leave the room with stomach cramps.
Imagine if Teddy Roosevelt had been there instead of Franklin Roosevelt. Ted and Joe would have been brawling on the ground while their interpreters tried to separate them.
The big arguments about invasion plans continued at Teheran. All of 1943 was a diplomatic squabble over this. Churchill continued to advocate an Allied invasion of southeastern Europe as a sound alternative to OVERLORD, the cross-channel invasion of France.
FDR did not support this. He was in favor of a Mediterranean invasion up Riviera France (this would come about in June 1944 under the code name ‘ANVIL’.) Ike liked this idea too. But General Mark Clark took Churchill's side. Mark preferred to use the Mediterranean forces to invade the Balkans rather than open up a second front in France.
Stalin vigorously argued for at least the second front in Southern France. The Marshall sternly advised against the US-UK Allies invading Southeastern Europe. Gee, I wonder why he would be against that. Uncle Joe got his way.
The Soviets and the Americans thus ganged up on the British and squashed a plan that may have had some very fine long term benefits. Churchill was considering post-war political considerations, as opposed to only considering the quickest way to Allied victory. Stalin had the same post-war political reasons in mind in resisting Churchill's idea. The two were in a game, both thinking one deeper than the Americans who were naively choosing the winner. The Russian and the British were pretending not to know that a rough game of political struggle was taking place. The Americans genuinely did not know the game was on, thanks to Welles, Roosevelt, Hopkins and a few other legally blind politicians of the Democratic Party running the war, men who had believed in the goodness of the “Russian Experiment” as it was called in the early 1930’s and in the badness of the imperialist British Empire. The evidence is simply overwhelming (and even pro-Roosevelt historians concede this) that Roosevelt foolishly trusted the Russians and believed that the new wartime friendship would absolutely translate into Soviet good behavior after the war. Churchill tried to warn Roosevelt about the real nature of the 'Bolos,' but FDR would hear none of it.
The fate of post-war Germany was a subject of much debate at Teheran. It was agreed that the Reich would be divided into three spheres of occupation. Stalin preferred that Germany would be divided into four or five separate small permanent states, never again capable of uniting and threatening Russia.
The outer edges of Germany would be sliced off and given to all of its hungry neighbors. France would get some areas in the industrial west. Denmark would get some territory near the Kiel Canal. Poland would take a slice from Germany in the west to compensate for the territory she would have to give to Russia in the east. The Czechs would get a strip of real estate. Maybe an independent neutral German state could be set up in the Bavarian South. In any case Germany would be reduced in size and power. Former Nazis would be prosecuted and denied voting rights, and the industrial might of the truculent Nordic nation would be eliminated.
There was talk of taking every piece of every German factory out of the country and leaving Germany a rural farming country that could never bother anyone again, a Jefferson dream imposed by force on a modern country. What is more spectacular, there was actually some serious talk between Stalin and Roosevelt of reducing France to this same position. Roosevelt couldn’t stand French colonialism nor Charles de Gaulle personally. Stalin was indescribably bitter towards France for supinely surrendering to Germany in 1940 and leaving Hitler’s western flank secure for the German attack against Russia the next year. Britian alone was very much against reducing Germany to a Jeffersonian utopia and supported a post-war revival of France.
The main issue for Stalin on his Iranian vacation was securing an Allied promise to open up the OVERLORD second front soon. Stalin said that he needed to know the precise timing so that he could a plan a major Soviet offensive from the east at the same time.
He got what he wanted in the form of a pledge for the Western armies to hit the beach on the target date of May 1 1944.
Throughout much of 1943 there were many diplomatic feelers between Russia and German concerning a possible armistice on the eastern front, and a negotiated settlement. When the battle of Russia was in the balance the Jerries were offering the Rooskies a deal based on a return to the boundaries after the conquest of Poland in September 1939. But later in the year the Russians were demanding the boundary of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1917,) a line far worse for Germany.
Russia almost certainly was not going to make a deal with Germany, but how could the US and the UK be sure that they wouldn't? This was the big fear in the western camp. Russia went out of its way to let the British and the American know that these secret negotiations were taking place, just to help scare them into opening up the second front in the west.
SPY WARS
Stalin had a key advantage over Churchill and Roosevelt at Teheran. The Soviets had many spies working deep undercover in both the British and the American governments, and the reverse was not true. In the game of Cold War espionage in WWII the Americans never showed up, and lost by forfeit. The U.S. was so focused on spying against Germany that it never crossed Sammy’s mind to spy on Russia, nor to stop them from doing it to the U.S..
Russia released many formerly secret documents in the mid-1990’s. These proved that the Soviets ran giant spy rings in both the USA and the UK throughout the war.
Stalin knew every major policy position that Churchill and Roosevelt were going to propose long before FDR’s plane circled to land in the Crimea. He knew which positions were real, which were bluffs, and what Frank and Win’s fallback positions would be. It makes painful reading for me.
Much is made of the Allies breaking the codes of both Germany and Japan, and having this critical advantage in the war. Less is made over the USSR having a critical advantage over the US-UK alliance by spying on the US while pretending to be friends, and pretending that when Moscow dissolved the Comintern (the Communist International revolutionary troublemaking world army) in May 1943 that meant anything.
Stalin knew for example, that the US was planning to downsize its armed forces decidedly and immediately after the war. This probably whetted his appetite for an aggressive foreign policy approach to the post-war talks. Stalin knew that Churchill stubbornly wanted a second front in the Balkans and he also knew that there was divided opinion on this in the American camp.
The sad fact is, more than 300 Soviet spies operated in the United States in World War Two. Some of the most important were Harry Dexter White, Laurie Duggan, Donald McColgan, Lauchlin Currie, and Alger Hiss.
Lauchlin Currie was a senior administrative assistant on FDR’s personal staff. He passed-on FDR’s thoughts to a Communist cell as fast as Roosevelt could blurt them out.
Harry Dexter White was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. The Secretary was Henry Morganthau, an intimate advisor and friend of Frank Morganthau. And Henry Morgy had some say in just about everything. Morganthau was one of only a handful on earth who had FDR's inside ear. He was like Bobby Kennedy, he had a powerful insider job but he was ten times more powerful than that. H.D. White was involved in much more than mere Treasury business. Henry Morganthau's Assistant Secretary at the Treasury Department was working for the USSR throughout the entire war!
Larry Duggan ran the State Department’s South American office while spying for the USSR. Larry had become close to both Sumner Welles and the Vice-President, Henry Wallace, both of them prominent lefties.
Alger Hiss headed a spy ring in the United States. And after the war, Congressman Richard Nixon targeted Hiss as a Communist. The left hissed and booed. Nixon was a paranoid reactionary. Some still say that Hiss was innocent. He was guilty.
Across the sea the British government was infiltrated at high levels for the entire war to a sorrowful degree. The most famous were the Oxford pinks who betrayed their country and flag throughout the war and became known as the “Cambridge Five” (Leonard Durst, James Black, Thomas Lane, James Philby, Dennis Franken.) For years, everything Churchill said or wrote down on a napkin was read by Stalin within a day or two at the most.
The head of the OSS, Bill Donovan, was a trusting Russophile like his boss FDR. He wanted to interlink the Soviet secret police with his own developing CIA (not by that name yet.) Donovan was doing a great job spying on the Germans but a poor job of never even suspecting, let alone knowing, those unfaithful allies, the Russians were spying on the USA.
RUSSIAN WINTER OFFENSIVE BEGINS 12 43
The Germans were deployed on the Russian front in three large Armies under Kuchler, Busch, and Manstein, north to south. It was the Southern group under Manstein that would take the brunt of the Russian winter offensive of 1943-44.
The Russians chose to concentrate its attack in the south for several good reasons, some military, others political.
The Germans in the north and center were fairly evenly spread on a solid line of defense. But the southern front was a German salient, a pennant shaped triangle with the sharp end deep inside Soviet territory. The Southern German front was the furthest east and made it an obvious priority from a defensive standpoint, let alone an offensive one. Russia pride was a factor in swatting the German bugs away from the Bug River asap. The salient also offered the best chance of cutting off and trapping German armies.
A Russian advance on the southern front could open the ports on the Black Sea, an important gain in the cold winter months when the north was frozen.
Politically, Stalin had a covetous eye on the Balkans. If he could concentrate force on the southern front, he could capture the quarrelsome Ukraine, then move into areas in southeaster Europe where the Russians had long been trying to take over long before Marx grew his beard.
The Tehran Conference had made it clear that the US-UK would not oppose a Soviet victory over Southeast Europe. Churchill had given up on his dreams of getting the United States to support an Allied invasion of the Balkans (avenging 1941 and 1914,) so he and Franklin gave the Red Army the green light at Tehran.
The Big Red assault against Manstein was commenced on Christmas Eve 1943. Lashuaski was taken on the 27-th.
SOURCES (complete official list of WWII books consulted are at end of FDR 1945 chapter)
The American Pageant, A History of the Republic, by Thomas A. Bailey of Stanford University – c) 1961 D.C. Heath (first edition was published in 1957)
If you only read one general history of the United States, read this one. It's written for high school students in 1961, which means it's written for adults today.
Battle Report, The Atlantic War, Prepared From Official Sources by Commander Walter Karig, USNR, with Lieutenant Earl Burton, USNR, and Lieutenant Stephen L. Freeland, USNR
- Farrar and Rinehart - c)1946 - “Published in Cooperation With the Council on Books in Wartime
Lieutenant Karig gets corny now and then, and big time.
The Conquerers, Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Germany, 1941-1945, by Michael Beschloss – c) 2002 - Simon & Schuster
This book provided the vital information that Sumner Welles was maybe gay.
Delivered From Evil, by Robert Leckie – c) 1987
I read Helmet For My Pillow when I was in the seventh grade and have been reading this war-lover's war books ever since. This fat history of WWII is one of the better ones out there, especially with his POV (point of view) livening up the read. Bob would have shoved Churchill's cigar up his nose if he got the chance in 44. Leckie fought in half the major battles of the Pacific War in the Marine Corps.
The Growth of the American Republic, Vol II 1865-1937, by Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager – c) 1940 Oxford Univ. Press.
This book is great but is is overrated too. This is a famous work. Some call it the best general American history textbook of all time. I don’t.
History of a Free People by Henry W. Bragdon, high school history teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy, and Samuel P. McCutchen college history teacher at New York University.
Land Battles: North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, by Trevor Nevitt Dupuy, Col. U.S. Army Ret. - c) 1962
This book is childishly simplistic. Thank God for such books. 800 page professorial books often can't find the forest for the trees. There is so much detail you walk away in a fog of unclarity. Or, at least I do.
The Memoirs of Field-Marshall the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein K.G. - c) 1958 - World Publishing, Cleveland
I was prejudiced against Monty from reading the American accounts that call him a snob egoist jerk. This applies to modern American historians as well as Monty’s contemporaries in the war years.
But reading his memoirs, I like what I see.
The Mighty Endeavor, American Armed Force in the European Theater in WWII, by Charles B. MacDonald - c) 1969 - Oxford University Press
The 519 page hardcover is little short on maps but not on overall quality. I wish ME opened flat, so one can read and eat at the same time.
The National Experience – Part Two A History of the United States Since 1865 by John M. Blum (Yale), Edmund S. Morgan (Yale), Willie Lee Rose (The Johns Hopkins University), Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (City University New York), Kenneth M. Stampp (University of California Berkeley), and C. Vann Woodward (Yale) – c) 1981 Fifth Edition
Great project but some of the chapters drag.
Out of Many; A History of the American People, by John Mack Faragher (Yale), Mari Jo Buhle (Brown), Daniel Czitrom (Mount Holyoke), and Susan H. Armitage (Washington State) - c) 1994 - Prentice Hall
I enjoy reading or browsing this collaborative schoolbook, in spite of its slick lib bias.
The Oxford History of the American People, by Samuel Eliot Morison – c) 1965 Oxford University Press
When I was 12 years old I used to spend hours every other day joyously reading Morison's 15 volume History of the United States Naval Operations in WWII at the South Boston Public Library. The librarian used to kick me out of the adult section regularly which made me mad. So what if these books were over my head half the time? If I want to read the adult books, why should they boot me back to the infantile kid's books? I wasn't bothering anyone. I absorbed at least half of what I was reading. I'd be reading these books in a corner of the library trying hard not to be noticed by the books Gestapo. It was one of the most enjoyable and most exasperating experiences of my entire life.
When I found out much later in life that Sammy Morison was also a general historian, I couldn't wait to read these books, this time without Mrs. Martinet tapping me on the shoulder and telling me I had to put the book back and go to the children's section.
The adult is disappointed with Sam's general American history work, and at times I wished the librarian could tap me on the shoulder in my room at 4 a.m. make me go back to the children's section, so I could keep my heroic opinion of him intact.
A Short History of the American Nation, by John A. Garraty of Columbia – c) 1966
Garraty was 21 when “the Japs” attacked Pearl Harbor. He became a swimming instructor at the Merchant Marine Academy as a war service. College boys always got an exemption.
The United States: The History of a Republic, by Richard Hofstadter of Columbia, William Miller, and Daniel Aaron of Smith - c) 1957 Prentice-Hall
If this 10 pound hardcover was new it would cost the student's father about $90. I got it for three dollars at a flea market in 1996. It is 2010 and I have read 618 pages. Its one of those fun general histories that I never expect to finish but always do eventually.
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