July 24, 2013

FINEST HOUR 124, AUTUMN 2004

BY SIR MARTIN GILBERT AND RICHARD M. LANGWORTH

ABSTRACT
Who really postponed the Second Front for a full two years?

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I do not feel that I am the person to comment on what Norman Rose and Warren Kimball describe as the “at best, deeply misleading” sentence that introduced my essay, since the document on which that sentence was based is in Roosevelt’s communication of 7 March 1942 (Kimball, Churchill & Roosevelt, The Complete Correspondence, Princeton University Press, 1984, I 390-93). It is curious that this document is nowhere referred to in their essay, which starts, in fact, a month later, in April 1942.

Incidentally, their conclusion exactly mirrors mine, both in my Finest Hour article, and in my recent book. D-Day, published in the Wiley Turning Points series.

Given that all of us are working from the same set of documents, which can be found in some detail in our respective historical works, it is not surprising that we essentially tell the same tale. Their references in their article to my books, Finest Hour (1983) and Road to Victory (1986), are an example of this convergence. Differences of emphasis are of course to be expected. -MG

It was I who created the provocative subtitle (“abstract”), culling the sentences respectively from the last paragraphs on pages 24 and 27 (with every wish that it would draw a response). So I should at least explain myself. I have no argument with the facts so masterfully marshalled by Warren Kimball and Norman Rose, who offer us a most lucid and interesting tour through the sources and their usual thorough footnotes. Differences of emphasis do indeed exist, and matters Churchill would be dull without them.

I believe the decision to postpone D-Day until 1944 lay chiefly with Roosevelt for the most basic of reasons: the USA, not Britain, was—or would be by DDay— the chief protagonist, bringing a preponderance of something like two-thirds of the troops and materiel to the attack, not to mention its supreme commander. What appealed to me about Sir Martin’s piece was his defense of Churchill from the quotidian accusation that he resisted (or indulged in diplomatic buncombe over) the invasion of France, when the invasion was never seriously possible until the spring of 1944, and everyone involved knew it. In the meantime, things occurred elsewhere which—for Churchill at least, who was always willing to consider alternatives to bloody frontal assaults—created targets of opportunity worth at least a glance. For example, in February 1944, Professors Kimball and Rose note, “Churchill again proposed planning an invasion of Norway lest the Normandy attack fail—a proposal that would have drained resources from the campaign in France.” If the Normandy attack had failed, what campaign in France?

This is not to suggest that Churchill was always right, though one may doubt he was timid based on what happened in World War I. Certainly he preferred to avoid “a sea full of corpses,” as he told Marshall recalling Gallipoli and 1915. But no one who headed for London rooftops to glare at approaching bombers can be conceived of as timid. I do believe Churchill’s military thinking was demonstrably more flexible than that of Marshall, Roosevelt or Stalin—or perhaps Stalin as stating his terms to Marshall and Roosevelt.

Everyone knew what “second front” meant. It meant a European front second to Stalin’s. That Churchill saw the whole European coast as “open to us” is indicative more of his breadth of view than of opposition to a specific landing point which, speaking of one track minds, was the only one the Americans wholeheartedly supported. Why, exactly? I leave that to the historians. But do we really accept that a landing in Normandy was the only way to get at Nazi Europe?

“Seeming to agree that SLEDGEHAMMER in 1942 might be necessary” suggests that Churchill was against this operation, which Professors Kimball and Rose accurately describe as “an imprudent plan of desperation.” Was he not right to be against it—in the abstract, since the Soviets did not collapse, and the need for such desperate measures never arose?

Words are tricky things. We read that Roosevelt is “ambiguous,” Stalin “pointed,” while Churchill is “disingenuous,” if not “bombastic.” If “hurl[ing] every sinew of our strength” against the Germans is too bombastic, should Churchill have said, “of course we will do what we can”? Such pabulum would not only have been out of character; it would be singled out today to prove Churchill’s lukewarm support for OVERLORD.

Professors Kimball and Rose note that it was Roosevelt, not Churchill, who seriously considered invasion in 1943 despite logistic and materiel impossibilities. It was Roosevelt, not Churchill, who was “optimistic about chances for a very quick victory in North Africa.” And it was Roosevelt who worried that failure to act in North Africa and Italy would have proven Josef Stalin’s stern claim that FDR and Churchill were unwilling to confront the enemy, and encouraged Americans (which Americans?) to demand more emphasis on the Pacific. Yet it is Churchill who “failed to notify Washington of assessments by his military planners that North African exploits would eliminate any chance of OVERLORD in 1943.” Washington required Churchill to tell them that?

In one of his pointed moments, Stalin says that the Germans would keep “as many allied divisions as possible in Italy where no decision could be reached.” I honestly forget—how many divisions were pulled out of Italy to make D-Day possible in France? Wasn’t Churchill announcing in the Commons that Rome had surrendered on the very morning the invasion of France was launched?

Past doubt, Italy was no quick route to victory. (Neither was France, as it turned out; it took after all nearly a year—and with fewer mountains in the way at that.) But with Stalin demanding his allies come to grips with Hitler’s armies as far away from him as possible, and no serious chance of inhabiting France in 1943, the Anglo-Americans had no alternatives—presuming they wished to include Stalin in the grand strategy.

Professors Rose and Kimball raise a key question on page 34: Would a D-Day delay “have tempted Stalin to reject agreements—agreements he later accepted and honored—setting forth what were presumed to be temporary zones of occupation in Germany together with the notorious percentages agreement regarding the Balkans?” This indeed raises interesting questions. What agreements over Europe did Stalin accept and honor? The most outstanding one in my recollection was his promise to leave Greece alone: which he made at the oft-criticized “percentages” (TOLSTOY) meeting with Churchill.

There is perhaps reason to debate the image of an all-knowing, all-wise, treaty-friendly Uncle Joe, whose pronouncement that an invasion of northwest France was “the only acceptable military strategy” seems always to be accepted as sine qua non. It was Stalin who had refused to believe his friend Hitler was attacking him in June 1941; who was absent from leadership in the early weeks of the invasion; who vainly threw 500,000 men into the Courland Redoubt in 1945. And Stalin did not initially know of the Manhattan Project, which turned Japan from a fight-to-the-finish kamikaze to a hat-in-hand signatory aboard USS Missouri inside of a month. Of one thing we may be sure: invading northwestern France was the only acceptable strategy to Stalin.

Like the decision to use the atomic bomb, the decision to postpone D-Day was officially that of the Prime Minister and President. Officially, they jointly “opted for landings in North Africa, a campaign that led ineluctably to the invasion of Sicily and then Italy,” though I don’t presume to know what “Churchill had hoped.” In reality, it was Roosevelt who called the shots, and opted for the 1943 alternatives: because by 1943 Britain was a junior partner, and American troops and materiel governed the outcome. And FDR acted as he did for sound and sensible military reasons. —RML
 

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