Mediterranean theater I

Even before Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Army had been planning to defeat Hitler by invading France. A war with Japan, should it take place, was to be a holding action until Hitler was defeated. General George C. Marshall, the army’s chief of staff, wanted that invasion to take place in 1943. In the meantime, troops and munitions would be assembled in Britain until the invasion date. The code name for this planned attack was Operation Roundup.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, on the other hand, wanted to concentrate on the Mediterranean. Because the Axis powers controlled the Mediterranean’s western approaches, British ships could not use the Suez Canal and thus had to go the long way to India around South Africa. Furthermore, campaigns in the Mediterranean would support Britain’s Eighth Army, which had been fighting Rommel in the western deserts of Egypt for months. Churchill always represented the Mediterranean as a place of wonderful opportunities for the Allies, but the Americans were skeptical.

Many believed that Churchill’s enthusiasm derived from the belief that Britain would not sustain huge casualties in the Mediterranean. This relative safety made it preferable to western Europe, which the Germans would fight hard to retain and where big losses could be expected.

However, waging a series of small campaigns in the Mediterranean while Soviet Russia did most of the fighting against Hitler’s legions in Europe did not seem like a good idea to General Marshall. Further, the U.S. Army’s heritage was one of directly engaging the enemy with maximum force and battering it into submission, not gradually wearing it down. It had done this in the Civil War and World War I and planned to do so again in this one.

The strategic decision was up to Roosevelt, who came down on Churchill’s side, ordering that North Africa be invaded in 1942. This campaign would be known as Operation Torch. Roosevelt did not deny Marshall’s point that making war on the margins of his empire would do little to weaken Hitler. But President Roosevelt had serious political problems. He had promised Stalin to open a second front in Europe in 1942, which the Soviets desperately wanted, and there was no possibility of invading France that year.

Furthermore, if no U.S. troops went into action against Germany until 1943, there would be great pressure on Roosevelt to send additional men and munitions to the Pacific. Americans hated the Japanese even more than the Nazis, and American planners always had to struggle to keep the Pacific war from overwhelming the strategically much more important struggle with Germany. An invasion of French North Africa would be easy, at least if Germany did not come in. Such a drive could be represented, however feebly, as a second front, and would justify a military buildup that could later be used to invade France.

The polls bore out Roosevelt. In February 1943, after U.S. troops had been mauled in Tunisia and the Allies were facing some 250,000 Axis troops there, 53 percent of Americans still thought Japan was the United States’s “chief enemy,” with only 34 percent nominating the Germans. Thus, if the North African operations were mainly political, they remained essential for just that reason.

On the larger issue of 1943, Marshall cannot be faulted. The victories in North Africa and the Mediterranean added the equivalent of 2 million tons of shipping when the Suez Canal finally became accessible as a result of them, but they otherwise did little to defeat Hitler. It was clear that Germany had to be beaten in Europe. The more time that was spent on campaigns at the edges of western Europe, the longer the war would last. Hence the importance of Roundup and the danger posed by Torch.

In its final form, Torch, under the command of Marshall’s favorite, Lieutenant General Dwight D. Eisenhower, became larger than Marshall desired but was a more cautious affair than if Britain had gotten its way. The plan was for three task forces of 35,000 to 40,000 men each to land simultaneously at widely separated points. A western task force would sail directly from the United States to land near Casablanca, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. A central task force, also consisting entirely of U.S. troops, would sail from Britain to Oran, on the Mediterranean coast. And a joint Anglo-American eastern task force would seize Algiers.

The great flaw in this plan, as the British had maintained from the start and Eisenhower soon realized, was that taking Casablanca offered no important benefits. Tunisia, only 100 miles from Sicily and the best place for a German buildup, was the real strategic prize. If the Allies could arrive there first, Hitler would lose General Erwin Rommel’s army and with it North Africa. But Marshall was firm about not pursuing this course, thinking Tunisia too much of a risk, so the best chance of making Torch pay off was lost before it started.

Everyone hoped that the French forces in North Africa would welcome the Allies as liberators. The problem was that these forces were under the command of the Vichy occupation government, which collaborated with the Nazis. Complex negotiations designed to win over the Vichyites in North Africa preceded Operation Torch. Admiral Jean Darlan, the head of France’s armed forces, which still had a powerful fleet in Toulon, France, that the Allies wanted, was also approached by the Allies. But the Allies, justifiably afraid of leaks, did not entrust their French contacts with the date. Therefore, on November 8, 1942, when the landings commenced, what the French would do was still uncertain.

Admiral Darlan, who by accident was in Algiers on November 8, initially ordered his forces to resist, then that evening announced a cease-fire in Algiers and two days later extended it throughout North Africa. However, Marshal Pétain in Vichy promptly canceled these instructions. Amid the resulting confusion in Oran and Morocco, fighting—some of it heavy—continued for days. The Moroccan operation turned out to be a shambles, thanks to poor military intelligence and inexperience, although its commander, Major General George S. Patton, Jr., would soon prove himself to be one of the war’s outstanding combat leaders. Even so, luck was with the Americans. Along the treacherous Moroccan coast, the landing conditions were ideal, with the seas calmer than usual. The Vichy French could not bring their superiority in manpower to bear because of the lack of transportation and general confusion. Spain, which had 100,000 troops in its part of Morocco, chose not to enter the war. U.S. divisional commanders displayed initiative after failing to make contact with Patton, and American forces quickly gained control of the sea and air. The French defense collapsed after three days.