1 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra D-Day 1942

D-Day 1942, D-Day 1944: A Comparative Analysis of Operations SLEDGEHAMMER and OVERLORD

Revised: 23 November 2009

1 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra For a few months during the spring and summer of 1942, there was no subject in the leadership councils of the Allies that commanded more attention and caused more friction than the decision of whether or not to open up a “Second Front” on the continent of Europe in the current year. Both the

Soviet government and many top American military leaders were anxious to launch a substantial Anglo-

American invasion across the English Channel, while most top British leaders became adamantly opposed to any such undertaking. Although Anglo-American staff officers had already developed a plan, code-named Operation SLEDGEHAMMER, for a cross-Channel operation in 1942, disagreements in the Allied coalition meant that it would not be until June of 1944, when the Anglo-Americans mounted

Operation OVERLORD, that an invasion across the English Channel became a reality. Though many historians have argued that the interval between the first serious Anglo-American proposal for an invasion across the English Channel in 1942 and the actual invasion more than a year and a half later constituted an indispensable period of preparation for the Allies, a close examination of available evidence demonstrates that their German opponents derived greater political, strategic and tactical benefits from the delay.

To do a fair and thorough examination of Operation SLEDGEHAMMER in relation to Operation

OVERLORD in their full historical contexts requires an honest appraisal of the true overall strategic situation, the state of German defenses in France, the battle for air supremacy, the submarine war, relative war production, and Allied logistical capabilities, as they existed and developed during this time frame. Two comparatively small but significant military operations, Dieppe and Kasserine, also demand a reassessment in the context of SLEDGEHAMMER and OVERLORD if only because all four of these operations have become inextricably linked with each other. A number of historians have used Dieppe and Kasserine to point both backward to the supposed futility of any attempt to invade the continent of

(by precipitating a putatively transformation in the Allies’ militaries) made possible.

For purposes of this study I will, for the sake of convenience, refer to those who explicitly or implicitly doubt the viability of SLEDGEHAMMER, either due to objections based on their analysis of

Dieppe or Kasserine, or for other reasons, as “Sledgehammer skeptics.” 1 Though I will endeavor to demonstrate that most of the objections to SLEDGEHAMMER that historians have raised in the past are doubtful at best and often entirely false, my intent is not to attempt to “prove” that SLEDGEHAMMER would have succeeded. This would only serve to commit the opposite, but essentially equal error of many of the Sledgehammer skeptics: attempting to give a definite or near definite answer to a historical

“what if?”2 My ultimate purpose is first to correct a number of errors regarding the issue of the early

“Second Front” that, masquerading as something like self-evident truths, mar a significant portion of the

World War II literature. More broadly, however, I seek to show, using a comparative analysis of

SLEDGEHAMMER and OVERLORD as a framework, how these errors are bound up with other more general distortions regarding the overall strategic situation in 1942 and the development of the war from that year forward to the middle of 1944.

The genesis of Operation SLEDGEHAMMER dates back at least as far as March of 1942 when British military planners began to cast about for some concrete way to aid their Soviet allies. Their principal aim was to draw off German ground and air forces fighting on the Eastern Front.3 Two groups of British planners formulated competing invasion plans, but they both revolved around the concept of landing a substantial force of ground troops across the English Channel of the coast of occupied France. The planners contemplated landings in one of two areas: the Pas de Calais in the vicinity of Boulogne, or the

Cotentin Peninsula,† at the northern extremity of which stood the major port of Cherbourg. Both of these plans, used the code-name SLEDGEHAMMER, which served as a catchall designation for any

† The Cotentin Peninsula is also known as the Cherbourg Peninsula.

3 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra limited cross-Channel operation aimed at establishing a bridgehead in northern France.4 Later on, further plans for a 1942 cross-Channel operation aimed at either Le Havre or Brest, also employed the

SLEDGEHAMMER code-name.5 The decision to use the same code-name for essentially different operations has caused no end of confusion for historians. When Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, in 1942 in

London as commander of American forces in Britain, wrote on 17 July that SLEDGEHAMMER had only a

“1 in 5” chance of success, it is clear he is referring to the Le Havre version, and not necessarily any of the other alternatives, a distinction that some authors have failed to note.6

The British had already debated at length the advisability of two original options for

SLEDGEHAMMER. A group known as the Combined Commanders – which included the Commander-in-

Chief of the British Home Forces, leading representatives of the RAF and Royal Navy, and the chief of

Combined Operations, Lord Louis Mountbatten – championed the Pas de Calais option. Mountbatten, though he was one of the Combined Commanders, as head of Combined Operations, also commanded the planners who favored the Cotentin option.7

The chief advantage of the Pas de Calais variant of SLEDGEHAMMER, which originally called for the landing of two armored and seven infantry divisions over a period in little more than three weeks, lay in its proximity to airbases in southern England from which the British hoped to leverage their large quantitative advantage in warplanes.8 Indeed, one of the primary rationales for SLEDGEHAMMER to begin with had been to draw in and destroy a sizeable portion of the German Luftwaffe, which might otherwise be used on the Eastern Front. The geographical location of the Pas de Calais, however, also had its disadvantages. Because it was close to both the British landmass and offered a direct path to the

German industrial heartland, the Germans could be expected to concentrate their defenses in the Pas de

Calais. Moreover, the beaches of the Pas de Calais were both less suitable to handling amphibious vessels, were more exposed to the northwest winds that prevailed in the English Channel, and had a

Mountbatten strongly favored the Cotentin version of SLEDGEHAMMER his own Combined

Operations organization had developed. The main advantage of the Cotentin option, as Mountbatten saw it, was that the Allies could use their dominant naval and air power to interdict the lines of communications running to the Cotentin Peninsula more easily than they could those that ran to the Pas de Calais, since the former were concentrated along long stretches of vulnerable Channel coastline, while the latter were more numerous and dispersed.9 Unfortunately, geography came into play with respect to the Cotentin alternative as well. Since it lay somewhat farther from the nearest British coastline, the projection of airpower, especially with respect to fighter cover, would be much more limited.

The plan to mount an amphibious operation across the English Channel in 1942 carried considerable appeal for top military leaders in the U.S. as well. Their preference was to build up considerable numbers of troops and supplies in Great Britain for a large cross-Channel invasion, code-named

Operation ROUNDUP, which they hoped to launch in conjunction with the British in the spring of 1943.

ROUNDUP had constituted the basis of agreed Anglo-American planning for the future prosecution of the war in Europe up to that point. Political and military developments, however, pushed the Americans in the direction of considering an earlier cross-Channel operation. American military leaders were concerned that a German defeat of the Soviet Union would ruin any prospect for an invasion of the continent since it would free up the better part of German ground and air forces currently engaged against the Soviets.10 At the same time, demands from other theaters threatened to disperse Allied

11 resources in campaigns that American planners considered secondary. SLEDGEHAMMER represented a possible solution to both of these potential problems. It promised both to lend effective assistance to the

5 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra Soviets, thus keeping them in the war and able to hold down the largest portion of German military might, and to force the focus of the bulk of Anglo-American resources on a single, decisive campaign.

Ironically, American affection for SLEDGEHAMMER soon eclipsed that of its British originators.

While it is an open question as to whether or not top British leaders were ever very keen on the idea of a cross-Channel invasion in 1942, they soon concluded that any such operation was doomed to failure.

Their internal discussions with respect to SLEDGEHAMMER showed that they would only consider actually launching that operation under the most extreme of circumstances. SLEDGEHAMMER, therefore, became nothing more than a planning exercise with some potential for actual implementation based on future contingencies, such as a complete collapse in German morale as had occurred in 1918, the British held to be unlikely to develop for some time.12 The Americans, on the other hand, viewed British growing reserve with respect to SLEDGEHAMMER with increasing alarm. They saw British hesitation as a sign that the British was not serious about ROUNDUP in 1943 either, and feared that their ally was generally unwilling to risk any kind of major cross-Channel operation at all.13 Growing British coolness towards SLEDGEHAMMER, consequently, only served to make their American counterparts more eager to make them accept it. In what proved to be a futile effort, a delegation of Americans including, Gen.

George Marshall, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, and Adm. Ernest King, Chief of Naval Operations of the U.S. Navy, traveled to London in July 1942 to meet with top British leaders for the purposes of persuading them to go forward with SLEDGEHAMMER as soon as possible. Even after a number of acrimonious meetings with the Americans arguing vigorously for SLEDGEHAMMER, British opposition proved unyielding, and in the end it proved decisive. The SLEDGEHAMMER plan called for Britain to provide all of the naval forces for the operation as well as most of the air and much if not all of the ground forces. The surrender of British forces to the Germans at Tobruk in North Africa appears to

14 have put the final nail in the SLEDGEHAMMER coffin from the British point of view. During meetings

6 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra on 22 July, the Americans finally capitulated. There would be no cross-Channel attack in 1942, and one the following year began to look dubious as well, since before the American delegation left London they had agreed to a British proposal to invade French North Africa (Operation TORCH), an undertaking that seemed likely to divert to the Mediterranean resources required for an invasion across the English

Channel in 1943.15

Meanwhile, British staff officers, now with the assistance of a handful of American officers continued to labor away on refining the actual SLEDGEHAMMER plan, a process that continued for a week or so even after their superiors had agreed to its cancellation. Despite talk earlier in the year of a

“sacrifice operation,” that would probably mean the loss of whatever bridgehead that had been established along with most of the men landed there, by the time of the London meetings,

SLEDGEHAMMER had evolved into a plan that aimed at not just landing on the continent, but at staying there too. At this point there was agreement that the Cotentin alternative was the most promising, and a number of the British staff officers working on SLEDGEHAMMER even went so far as to diplomatically express their disagreement with their superiors’ conclusions as to its viability.16 The final

SLEDGEHAMMER plan was explicitly agnostic about how the main ground units would break down by nationality. The British units listed as available for the operation were two “new model” armored, three

“new model” and one “old model” infantry divisions, as well as one brigade of four parachute battalions, one brigade of 4 glider battalions, and seven Commandos. The plan does not specifically designate any of the specific British units under consideration for SLEDGEHAMMER, though the parachute and glider battalions had to be 1st Parachute Brigade and the 1st Airlanding Brigade of the British 1st Airborne

Division, which, though it had never seen combat before as a unit, consisted of troops many of whom were combat veterans. Undoubtedly, the Canadian 2nd Infantry Division, by virtue of their amphibious training, would also be primary candidates for any SLEDGEHAMMER force. The Americans had

7 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra available the 1st Armored Division as well as the 1st and 34th Infantry Divisions with a fourth division arriving slightly too late to participate in the proposed invasion, but which could have been part of the post invasion buildup. One or possibly two American parachute battalions would also be available.

From this pool, the planners envisioned an initial landing force of two brigade groups (roughly equivalent to an American Regimental Combat team), each with an additional infantry and tank battalion. The plan specified that a ten-week period would be needed after authorization for the

“assembly and reconditioning of craft and shipping, and for rehearsals.”17 The last few revisions to the

SLEDGEHAMMER plan came during the end of July. Given the ten-week lead time, those versions identified October 5th and 20th as the optimum upcoming dates from the standpoint of the required astronomical and tidal conditions, with a few days before and after each of those dates as possible alternatives. If the London talks that ended in the cancellation of SLEDGEHAMMER had gone the other way, the most likely date for SLEDGEHAMMER, therefore, would have been around October 5, 1942.

With the extra hours of darkness available during that time of year, the amphibious task force, including a naval covering force of cruisers, destroyers and over 900 smaller ships, could leave as early as 1900 hours on D-1 and still depart after last light, meaning that, unlike the case for OVERLORD, landing ships could make the entire cross-Channel voyage and even much of the return trip under cover of darkness. Two flotillas of fleet minesweepers would proceed in advance to clear a path in the

German minefields with an anti-submarine patrol guarding the task force to the west. By midnight (H-

4.5) the troop landing ships (LSI’s) were scheduled to arrive at disembarkation stations off the east coast of the Cotentin Peninsula where they would begin loading out their troops into British LCA’s (small armored landing craft). A group of LCP’s (early versions of the American Higgins-type small landing craft), having crossed the Channel without troops, would rendezvous with the LSI’s to pick up second wave troops for transport to the landing zones at Madeleine Beach on the peninsula’s eastern shore.

8 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra Each of the initial two brigades would land on its own front, with the attached infantry battalion leading the way, one and a half hours before first light and just before high tide. The first flight would total 3,400 men, and another 4,200 were due to follow one-half hour later. Once the initial waves had secured the main beachhead, the brigade groups, each with their accompanying tank battalion, would pass through the assault force and push inland. 105 tanks and over 900 other vehicles were scheduled to land by LCT (tank landing craft that could also carry up to 12 trucks) at first light together with 8,200 more men. One of the brigade groups would strike out north, via Valognes – the location of the defending division’s headquarters – to capture the port of Cherbourg. The other brigade group would drive south to link up with the two parachute landings, each of which would be two to three battalions in strength. One of the parachute drops would land just southwest of Carentan, the other near an abandoned airfield just southeast of Lessay close to the west coast of the peninsula, where the plan called for follow-on landings that would bring in antitank guns. The twin overall goals of the first phase of the operation were to seal off the narrow, 17-mile neck of the Cotentin Peninsula at the communications crossroads that run through Carentan and Lessay to the south, while also capturing and opening up the port of Cherbourg to the north.

Four or five smaller subsidiary landings – primarily Commando units tasked with neutralizing coastal batteries – were also scheduled to take place. Over the balance of D-Day, another 1,500 vehicles and one more brigade group would land. This third brigade group would relieve the Commando forces and another, smaller contingent of paratroops – which was to drop near Valognes to disrupt German communications – and then continue on to occupy the minor port of St. Vaast. Altogether approximately 21,000 men, including about 2,500 paratroops, were to land on D-Day. Interestingly enough, the envisioned totals come close to the actual number of men and vehicles – 21,238 and 1,742, respectively – that crossed the beaches on the eastern shore of the Cotentin Peninsula on 6 June 1944,

9 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra though on that date another 14,000 airborne troops landed in support of the amphibious operations and over 100,000 more men participated in the invasion in the other landing zones.18

The SLEDGEHAMMER plan aimed at establishing a permanent presence on the continent and, therefore, naturally involved a far more comprehensive operational plan than JUBILEE, the failed August

1942 British-Canadian cross-Channel raid on Dieppe. Though the operational objectives of

SLEDGEHAMMER differed in important respects from those of OVERLORD, there were a number of aspects of the SLEDGEHAMMER plan that bear a remarkable resemblance to OVERLORD. Like

OVERLORD,SLEDGEHAMMER would be covered by a deception plan designed to mislead the Germans as to the location or probability of a cross-Channel landing.19 In terms of diversionary feints,

SLEDGEHAMMER actually went OVERLORD one better, featuring not just one, but two diversionary operations – one that would simulate a landing at one of the Channel Islands, and another near Boulogne in the Pas de Calais. The SLEDGEHAMMER plan also included passive and active countermeasures – including spoofing – against German radar. The British S.O.E. was also charged with the coordination of sabotage operations by French resistance groups, which targeted railroads, and, if practicable, isolated groups of German planes. One of the special forces groups targeting German coastal batteries would even be sent against guns sited near Pointe du Hoc, where American Rangers on a similar mission would gain fame in 1944. The airborne troops would play a role analogous to what their counterparts attempted in June of 1944: the isolation of the battlefield from enemy reserves – though in the case of

SLEDGEHAMMER these would operate to block the intervention of reserves which were mostly south of

St. Lô – much farther away from the landing areas than would be the case for OVERLORD.

SLEDGEHAMMER anticipated OVERLORD with respect to innovation in the area of amphibious landing vessels as well. SLEDGEHAMMER would have been the first time large numbers of LCT’s participated in an amphibious landing, which otherwise had to wait to make major contributions to

Madeleine Beach in the fall of 1942 would have also benefited from specially modified support landing craft that would have poured direct fire on the beach defenses. True, the armament of the LCS’s that would have taken part in SLEDGEHAMMER – two .5 in Vickers guns and one 4” mortar apiece – was trivial compared to the massive firepower the rocket firing craft that supported OVERLORD carried. On the other hand, it would not have had the problem, as the more sophisticated rocket firing LCT’s did on

D-Day, of not being able to take a second, better-aimed shot in case the first one missed.

The SLEDGEHAMMER planners needed to find a way to land a large number of vehicles across the invasion beaches. The Americans, at the urging of the British, were already in the process of ramping up a large program for the construction of specially designed LST’s (tank landing ships, similar to, but much larger than LCT’s) that would fill this need admirably in the course of future amphibious operations. Only three LST’s ships would be available in time for SLEDGEHAMMER, however, and these were not special-built vessels, but less-capable conversions of already existing ships. The British had identified a partial solution to getting motor transport across the Channel, however. They requisitioned and converted nearly 1,000 Thames River barges, each of which could carry, on average, 2 ½ vehicles.

The conversion process included a ramp and a concrete coating for the bottom and sides of the barges to protect against machinegun fire. Though the Allies successfully used a number of these barges during

OVERLORD, they were far from ideal. The SLEDGEHAMMER planners, therefore, essentially improvised a kind of quasi-LST. By converting a number of medium-sized coasters† to vehicle transport ships they managed to obtain something of the same capability that LST’s would later provide. These coasters would beach themselves at high tide, dry-out, unload their vehicles on the beaches and then re-float for departure on the following tide. Interestingly enough, this method actually anticipated a practice

† Coasters are small cargo ships that typically engaged in coastal commerce. The British sometimes also referred to them as schuyts (Dutch term).

11 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra “discovered” after the June 1944 Normandy landings when Allied support personnel adopted the same technique to more rapidly discharge the cargo of the now numerous purpose-built LST’s. Moreover, the

British coaster fleet played a leading, though largely ignored, role in the supply operations that supported the Allied campaign in

Normandy. Not only did they provide a large part of the dry-cargo hauling capacity, they often delivered it to troops via the same “newly discovered” beaching and drying-out process that the

SLEDGEHAMMER planners had conceived of some two years earlier.

Allied air power. The real breakthrough the planners made in the Cotentin variant of SLEDGEHAMMER came when they realized that external drop-tanks, which were still something of a novelty, were the key to the problem of providing adequate fighter protection for forces that would operate 100 miles or so

20 from most supporting airbases. Interestingly enough, the SLEDGEHAMMER fighter force would have featured the same two types of aircraft – Spitfires sporting external drop-tanks, and long range American

P-38’s – that provided most of the fighter cover for the landings at Salerno a year later, though for

Salerno Allied fighters had to fly nearly twice as far from their home bases. The planners reckoned that, even at then current production rates, they had a more than seven-week supply of drop-tanks. Such a time span ought to have left the invaders plenty of time to establish the required twenty squadrons of fighters on the Cotentin Peninsula on some of the many potential airfield sites the planners had already identified there.

The impact a SLEDGEHAMMER type cross-Channel strategy would have had on the use of Allied heavy bombers may have been even more important. Up until that point, much of Allied strategic air power had been involved in bombing targets of dubious military value, including German population centers. Whatever effect such bombing had in the long range, it is clear that in 1942 Allied bombing raids were contributing little to winning the war against Germany, despite the enormous resources

Britain and the U.S. had already poured into building, servicing and basing their big-bomber offensives.

The Americans, which in the late summer were just beginning to send significant numbers of heavy bombers to Britain, spent most of the next several months conducting air raids of little significance, while trying to build up critical mass in a force in effectively split in two, with a large portion moving to

North Africa to support TORCH.SLEDGEHAMMER promised to redirect Anglo-American bombers onto more profitable targets like airfields, roads, and railways that could have a more immediate impact on

An air campaign that targeted enemy airfields had proven itself time and again during the war. The

Germans had successfully employed such methods to gain air superiority in Poland, France and Russia.

Some historians have argued that it was the abandonment of the bombing of airfields in favor of cities that cost the Luftwaffe its best chance at winning the Battle of Britain. Ironically, in the wake of their air victory in the fall of 1940, the British ended up eschewing the strategy that threatened to defeat them in favor of the same failed strategy that had apparently handed them victory.21 In North Africa, British

Air Marshal Tedder had already recognized the possibilities in applying “the Germans’ own formula” as far back as the spring of 1941 and he continued to use it during the balance of his tenure as air commander in the Mediterranean, often achieving results that surpassed even his own already high expectations. Without a complimentary invasion, however, the bombing of airfields would have probably had no more effect than to drive the Luftwaffe further inland. Though that would have represented a greater accomplishment than what the RAF had otherwise achieved, it still would not have enabled the Allies to fully leverage the numerical advantages in aircraft and trained pilots they had already long-since accrued. Indeed, the promise the a cross-Channel operation held in terms of enabling the Allies to translate their quantitative advantages into actual strategic advantage had always been one of the most powerful arguments in favor of SLEDGEHAMMER and one that even contemporaneous skeptics had to acknowledge.

In yet another example of how SLEDGEHAMMER anticipated OVERLORD, the SLEDGEHAMMER plan featured a kind of mini-Transportation Plan that involved the bombing of railways, marshalling yards, entraining stations and road junctions. The principal aim was, as it would be for the full-scale

Transportation plan in 1944, to slow up the rate of German reinforcement. As Mountbatten’s staff had

14 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra argued from the beginning of the planning process, the particular geography of the Cotentin Peninsula would aid considerably Allied efforts to isolate the lodgment from reinforcement and resupply. As they pointed out, the Allies would have a far easier time cutting the roads and rail lines running towards the

Cotentin Peninsula than they would if they landed on the Pas de Calais where the lines of communications were far more numerous there. In effect, the geography of the Cotentin Peninsula offered the Allies the same advantages for interdiction as the geography of Italy would in 1943, with the added bonus that the Allies could also easily bring to bear their superior naval power in their interdiction efforts since the main railway and road leading to the peninsula ran for miles very near the English

Channel.22 Though it is true that one of the suggested bombing target categories – marshalling yards – did not prove later in the war to be a worthwhile type of target, it is significant to note that American bombers, even at that early stage of the war, demonstrated they could operate effectively against another one of the types of target found in the SLEDGEHAMMER air plan: railways. On 9 October 1942, a force of just over one hundred B-17’s bombed railways near Lille.23 A German report stated that this one raid had knocked out three rail lines – one for a duration of twelve hours, another for twenty-four and the third for an “indeterminate” length of time.24 During the course of World War Two, just three rail lines served the Cotentin Peninsula.

Another notable aspect of the SLEDGEHAMMER plan was the care the planners took in disguising the pre-invasion air preparations. Attacks on enemy airfields were to begin in northeastern France, Belgium and Holland where the Allies could hope to reduce the number of available German airplanes while at the same time diverting their enemies’ attention away from the intended landing area. Similarly, the air plan called for the nighttime bombing of industrial targets adjacent to important rail lines in order to camouflage the true target of the bombers. In 1944, the OVERLORD planners, who also wanted to disguise their true intentions while at the same time conducting a preparatory air campaign, achieved

15 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra much the same result by bombing so widely that the Germans would have difficulty discerning where the area of concentration, and thus the probable location of an impending invasion, might be.

There were a few important differences with the OVERLORD plan, however. A fall 1942 cross-

Channel landing would have taken place closer to high tide and, significantly, under cover of darkness.

Landing nearer high tide was obviously a way in which attacking troops could reduce exposure to direct enemy fire, but that was no longer a viable option for OVERLORD after the Germans began to install numerous obstacles on defended beaches in early 1944, so the first waves of Allied troops landing in

June of 1944 had to cross virtually the entire span of the beach near low tide. The use of smoke, which the British used to good effect at Dieppe, was another feature of the SLEDGEHMAMMER plan that did not play a significant part in the OVERLORD landings.25 A soldier landing close in from an armored British

LCA, at night and masked by smoke – as would have been the case for SLEDGEHMAMMER – should have stood a far better chance at successfully assaulting shoreline defense positions than was the case on

D-Day.

The most significant difference between SLEDGEHMAMMER and OVERLORD, however, was that a campaign on the Cotentin Peninsula would by design have quickly become essentially a defensive one.

The SLEDGEHMAMMER planners hoped to seal off the narrow neck of the peninsula on day one. Putting aside the seizure of the ports to the north, which the planner hoped to accomplish within a few days, the rest of the fighting for the foreseeable period after that would have been to hold on until the Allies could launch ROUNDUP the following spring. The criticism leveled against SLEDGEHMAMMER on the basis that the Germans could have dealt with an invasion by just sealing off the peninsula is an odd one. First of all, unlike OVERLORD, advancing south from the peninsula was never an immediate operational objective for SLEDGEHMAMMER. More importantly, Hitler, from a political standpoint, could hardly have tolerated the presence of any Allied force on French soil. While many authors have written about

16 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra the “politics of the Second Front” from the Allied perspective, they have curiously ignored the German side of the equation. The presence of Anglo-American troops on the continent of Europe would serve as dramatic evidence of the ebbing of German military dominance, which would not only tend to encourage his enemies and dishearten his supporters in Europe generally, but specifically risk irrevocably losing the French to the Allied side. Putting aside the probability of whether the Vichy regime would actually join forces with the Allies – French head of state Marshal Pétain was highly unlikely to be moved from his position of non-belligerency and it was unthinkable that Vichy’s head of government, Pierre Laval, would even consider joining with the Anglo-Americans – the possibility of such an eventuality would have certainly given Hitler pause. Hitler himself could not have ignored the risk of a French defection in the context of the fall of 1942 for the good reason that such a turn of events, regardless of his calculations regarding their probability, would have put the Allies in his rear both in

France and in North Africa. If Hitler had a weakness as a strategist, it was not that he was blind to such eventualities, but that he was hypersensitive to them. It is highly improbable, therefore, that Hitler would have chosen merely to isolate the Cotentin Peninsula and deal with it “at his leisure,” since every day the Anglo-Americans remained there would potentially be one more day the French could have turned on him.

Perhaps the criticism of SLEDGEHMAMMER based on the perception that it could not break out into the interior of France, at least without great difficulty, is based on the idea that an earlier cross-Channel operation would necessarily be a kind of mini-OVERLORD moved up in time. As already noted,

SLEDGEHMAMMER had distinct operational goals which did not involve an immediate breakout from

Normandy. The strategy was to take pressure off the Soviets by drawing off and destroying a significant portion of the Luftwaffe as well as to force the Germans to redeploy some of its ground forces to France.

The Allies would also be able to setup airbases on the continent with which to support a larger cross-

17 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra Channel invasion the following spring. As familiar as we are with the way OVERLORD progressed from landing to eventual spectacular breakout, an operation that merely aimed to capture a relatively small portion of French soil may seem, in comparison, oddly feeble. Certainly, if the Anglo-Americans had been convinced that they had the power to do in 1942 what they eventually did do in 1944 they would have made every effort to do so. Not even the staunchest advocates of SLEDGEHMAMMER, however, dreamed of anything resembling the breakout and pursuit of July and August 1944.

Nevertheless, in the context of the military situation of 1942, a purely defensive battle promised real, albeit less obvious benefits. Though the Second World War saw a number of mobile campaigns where mechanized armies proved they could move farther and faster than armies could ever dream of doing in the past, there is abundant evidence that demonstrates that these were truly exceptional events and that

Clausewitz’s declarations regarding the superior strength of the defensive still held true. Specifically, battles in which the defending force had the benefit of a continuous front without glaring weak spots typically meant defeat or at least very high casualties for the attacking forces, whatever their nationality.

Even German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, a master at mobile warfare, acknowledged this phenomenon during the First Battle of El Alamein in July 1942:

The whole front had now solidified. In operational terms, the British were in their element, for their strength was in conducting a method of warfare that corresponded to the modern form of infantry battle and Stellungskrieg [positional warfare]…the war took on a shape in which both sides possessed a great deal of experience and theoretical knowledge, but neither side could bring forth anything that would be revolutionary or completely new to the other.26

In the summer of 1942, the same British Army that had just suffered a series of stunning reverses in the mobile battles against Rommel’s Afrika Korps was able to check their opponents decisively once the battle began to resemble a positional one. On the Russian Front, the Red Army demonstrated a parallel dramatic turnaround: the same army that the Germans had routed in mobile battles during the high summer months were able to hold out against superior numbers of attacking troops once the battle

18 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra became a positional one at Stalingrad. As British Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery would later write: “If your flanks and rear are secure, you are well placed for battle.”27 An Anglo-American force defending the narrow neck of the Cotentin Peninsula would find themselves in just such a situation, and on terrain that the OVERLORD battles of 1944 would amply demonstrate was highly favorable for the defense. The idea that the Germans would sweep an invading Anglo-American back into the sea with ease, does not take into account the inherent strength of defensive warfare, nor the tremendous advantages the hedgerow country would have conferred on a defending force on the Cotentin Peninsula.

Of course, these factors do not guarantee success for the Allies. Hitler would attack aggressively for the political reasons outlined above. If the Anglo-American had been able to establish themselves in the bocage country, however, there is every reason to believe that the fighting there would be every bit as bitter and bloody as it would be during the OVERLORD campaign with the crucial difference that the advantages that accrue to the defender would benefit the Allies. Such a war of attrition, in the overall strategic context of 1942, would be, just as it was in 1944, a battle that Germany could less afford to fight than the Allies. A 1942 Battle of Normandy, therefore, promised to be less like a smaller-scale

OVERLORD than it would be a miniature Stalingrad in the hedgerows.

Admittedly, there is no evidence that even the advocates of SLEDGEHAMMER fully recognized either its potential political or military benefits. There is every reason to believe, however, that British Prime

Minister Winston Churchill would have discerned the significant political leverage that a successful

SLEDGEHMAMMER might have made possible. Earlier that year, when the Allies had still hoped to turn

Vichy to the Allied cause, Churchill had spoken of offering them a choice between “blessings or curses” depending on whether they accepted Allied overtures to join in the war against Germany. It is not clear if Allied leaders ever attempted to follow up on Churchill’s proposed diplomatic gambit. The miscalculation underlying any such approach to the Vichy French at this time was that not only were

19 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra they asking their French interlocutors to commit what was objectively treason, they were asking them to commit treason in the context of a strategic situation that could seemingly only have brought disaster to

France. Whatever their hopes or prognostications regarding the long term outcome of the war, most

Vichy officials and military officers were not likely to take the existential risks in favor of actions that seemed so obviously doomed to failure since German military power seemed so manifestly in the ascendant. Moreover, the offer of “blessings or curses” only contains the potential to motivate to the extent that the one making the offer has the demonstrated power to fulfill either promise. The successful occupation of even a small part of Western Europe, combined with Germany’s already flagging prospects in Egypt and on the Eastern Front, on the other hand, would represent powerful evidence that the tide had truly turned against Nazi Germany. Under such circumstances, Vichy would be forced to reexamine its options. Even lacking such a demonstration, one high Vichy official had informed his

American interlocutor: “If you come with two divisions, we will fire on you. If you come with twenty- five divisions we will receive you with open arms.”28 In other words, only a manifestation of effective

Allied military power could change the attitude of the Vichy French. The policy of collaboration had already patently failed to bring France any of the economic or political benefits its advocates had hoped for at the beginning. Collaboration had always had as one of its premises the continuation of German military hegemony into the foreseeable future. Even without a cross-Channel invasion, however, that calculation was already beginning to look obsolete. There already were powerful forces inside of Vichy, principally in the French military, moving towards bringing France back into the war on the side of the

Allies in conjunction with a future Allied invasion (which was not anticipated to take place until the spring of 1943, however).29

A similar political recalculation would surely have taken place as well in the centers of power in the capitals of Germany’s formal Axis allies. Italy, above all, would find itself in a precarious position. The

20 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra same groups that would later turn on Mussolini in the fall of 1943 were already in late 1942 looking for a way out of the war. With defeat at El Alamein (or at least seemingly interminable deadlock there) and its even larger army smashed in Russia in mid-December, an Anglo-American military presence on the continent may have not only demonstrated the waning of German power in general, but also provided the opportunity for a volte-face without fear of German military intervention.

By the time OVERLORD came about, however, the Allies had lost their opportunity to exploit the soft political “underbelly” of Europe. The Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa drew the

Germans into Vichy just weeks before the Red Army counterattack at Stalingrad would expose the extent of German military vulnerability (and raise the specter of Soviet dominance on the continent). By the time the Italians were ready to change sides, the continuing campaign in the Mediterranean meant that there would be plenty of German troops at hand in Italy to ensure that its effects would be minimal.

The campaigns leading up to OVERLORD, therefore, had actually voided the opportunities for the Allies to exploit vulnerabilities in that region by drawing Germany into the power vacuum created by the political and military weakness of the Vichy and Italian regimes.

There is no evidence that the advocates of SLEDGEHMAMMER recognized either of these important potential benefits. All in all, however, the plan itself was excellent and demonstrated a great deal of innovation on the part of the British staff that produced it. The SLEDGEHMAMMER plan was hardly perfect, however. On the negative side it appears to be informed by a tendency to make overly cautious estimates regarding Allied resources and capabilities. On the face of it, this is hardly surprising given that the Allies had yet to actually undertake an amphibious operation on this scale. So, for example, the planners, looking forward to supplying the SLEDGEHMAMMER force in Normandy over the coming winter, estimate that the maximum capacity for Cherbourg at just 3,000 tons a day. In 1944, however,

Cherbourg discharged over 8,000 long tons a day in just its second month of operation, on its way to

Barfleur and St. Vaast are listed as less than one-half of the average discharge rate those ports would demonstrate in support of OVERLORD, even though in both cases it would be the same type coasters that would service those ports; by August of 1944 American support troops would increase the capacity of

Barfleur alone to 2,500 ton per day, three times its former capacity.31 The planners estimated that Allied fighter planes would only average two sorties per day, though during the Dieppe raid which took place just weeks later, the average was three per day, with some pilots actually flying four; during the June

1942 fighting in the Western Desert some fighter aircraft performed seven sorties a day, and some pilots as many as five.32 The plan states flatly that there will be no British Horsa gliders available for

SLEDGEHMAMMER though production of that type of glider had already begun and by that fall both

Horsas and trained pilots were in good supply.33 The estimate of the number of American fighter planes also seems quite low given the number already available in the U.S. and its demonstrated rate of shipment in convoys that had delivered American planes elsewhere in previous months.

There are some indications that the SLEDGEHMAMMER planners had not yet completely integrated all of the subordinate staff work by the time the final version. The plan sometimes repeats the outline for certain tasks, and while these repetitions do not directly contradict one another, they sometimes give different emphasis to different tasks, sequence or timing. This especially shows up in the air-tasking plan. The greatest flaw in the plan, however, revolves around the low capacity for the buildup following

D-Day. According to the plan, it will not be until D+6 that one corps of ground troops with the required support troops will have arrived. After that it envisions a weekly discharge capacity of only 26,000 men, 3,000 vehicles, and 20,000 tons of supplies.

On the other hand, the planners may have been guilty of putting too bright an overall appreciation as to the possibility of success. Though they hedged their assessment with ample notes of caution, it seems

22 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra unlikely that if the rate of buildup they envisioned would prove to be anywhere near adequate for there to be any chance to withstand a substantial German counterattack. The only hope SLEDGEHMAMMER would have had given the parameters of the final plan would have been a very successful deception operation that would have kept German reserves tied down in other areas. Though it was already established practice for the British to cover an operation of this size with a deception/cover plan and there are references elsewhere to the beginnings of planning for such an undertaking in support of

34 SLEDGEHMAMMER, there is no mention of one in the final SLEDGEHMAMMER operational plan.

Though the success of OVERLORD in 1944 was aided by strategic deception, from the perspective of the

SLEDGEHMAMMER planning staff in 1942, it would seem to be very risky to make overall success contingent on such an unpredictable enterprise.

**********

It is all too easy to look at a map of Europe and North Africa showing the extent of German military gains through the summer of 1942 and conclude that Nazi Germany was at the height of its power. On the contrary, however, such a map, as the developments of the following months would demonstrate, reveals the extent of potential German vulnerability. Germany had reached a Clausewitzian culmination point at the strategic level. Its military forces and resources were stretched to the breaking point.

Rommel’s army in Egypt, since it was supplied almost exclusively by motor vehicles that had to travel long distances from the nearest supply port, required an enormous amount of scarce fuel, just to transport supplies to the front. Once he was stopped in front of El Alamein in July, Rommel was effectively stuck at the end of an untenably long and expensive-to-maintain supply line.35 More significantly, the situation for the far larger German army in Russia was similarly bad. The German drive into the Caucasus had added a thousand miles to the frontage on the Eastern Front and exacerbated the already critical logistical situation there. The mechanized units of the First Panzer Army, which

23 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra constituted the spearhead of the German drive into the Caucasus, had already been reduced to an average of just 30% of their normal strength, with commensurate reductions in tank strength. With

Germany’s manpower stretched to the limit, the Germans had to rely on the ill-trained, poorly equipped and unmotivated troops of its Italian, Hungarian and Rumanian allies to protect hundreds of miles of critical frontage.36 By June, there wasn’t single reserve division remaining in Germany, and by the fall, the state of German Army reserves on the Eastern Front had also fallen to almost nothing.37 As one author puts it (in the context of the German 6th Army surrounded at Stalingrad later that fall): “[i]t is a sign of how low German fighting strength in the theater had sunk that out of the entire Wehrmacht,

[German Field Marshall] Manstein could assemble a single corps, just two divisions, for the [Stalingrad] relief offensive.”38 Even one of those two divisions, moreover, was just then arriving from France.

On the economic and resource front, Germany was also running up against the limits of its power.

The supply of fuel, the lifeblood of modern warfare, was, above all, the weak link in the German strategic situation. During a meeting convened to discuss the upcoming 1942 campaign on the Eastern

Front, Hitler confided to some of his leading generals that if he failed to attain a significant segment of the oil production regions in the Caucasus, he would have to “put an end to the war.”39 A German high command report from June of 1942 stated that for the balance of the year oil supplies would be “one of the weakest points” since “[r]eserves have been reduced to almost nothing.”40 As the year progressed, the continuing crisis with respect to oil supplies could have only made Hitler more convinced of the importance of capturing and holding significant oil-producing areas. Despite the importance Hitler placed on capturing areas of Soviet production, German forces were able to overrun just one, relatively small oil-producing center at Maikop, though only after the Soviets had thoroughly wrecked the infrastructure there.41 The fuel shortages that continued to hamper German operations during the balance of 1942 certainly played an important role in Hitler’s determination, against the advice of many

24 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra of his top officers, to keep large numbers of German troops in the Caucasus even after the envelopment of Stalingrad in late November placed them in grave danger of destruction.42

Like the ground forces on the Eastern Front, the German Luftwaffe by the middle of 1942 was operating at the limits of its capacities. The almost uninterrupted operation of a large part of its air force since the middle of 1941 (even the winter months on the Eastern Front had offered no respite since many units were temporarily sent to the Mediterranean for stepped-up operations there) had put considerable strain on the men and equipment of the Luftwaffe. Operational and other losses mounted such that by the fall the Germans could only achieve a measure of air superiority at Stalingrad by stripping other air units in the east of their men and planes. By the fall the Luftwaffe lost air superiority on the northern and central parts of the Eastern Front.43 Far to the south, the German drive for the vital oilfields at

Grozny south of Stalingrad had to struggle forward in the face of “crushing” Soviet air superiority. In a development with obvious significance for any possible cross-Channel operation, and yet another sign of increasing Luftwaffe weakness, Soviet naval units in the Black Sea, which during the summer had had to restrict its activities at sea to periods of darkness or poor visibility for fear of German air attacks, were, by the fall of 1942, roaming the same waters with impunity at all hours and irrespective of atmospheric conditions. Despite the concentration of all available air units into Luftflotte 4 (the principal Luftwaffe command on the southern portion of the Eastern front, where, from a German perspective, the decisive actions of 1942 were to take place), it was down to just 129 serviceable bombers by 10 October.44

In the west, the Luftwaffe’s strength was, not surprisingly, on the wane as well. It is significant to note that even during the Dieppe raid in August, the Luftwaffe, despite using all available resources, only managed to sink a single small warship and was unable otherwise to inflict major damage on the

British naval task force, or to effectively attack the invading troops.45 Over the course of the summer

25 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra and early fall of 1942, the Eastern Front, which had already tied down the largest part of the Luftwaffe, further depleted German air power in the West as more and more planes and pilots departed for duty in the East.46 Kampfgruppe 2, for example, which had contributed the largest number of bombers to the

Luftwaffe’s (unsuccessful) efforts against the Dieppe invasion force, by the end of September had seen the number of pilots ready for action fall to a mere 19, even though this was the sole major bombing unit remaining in northwest Europe at the time.47

At the end of September, the German Luftwaffe, which many Sledgehammer skeptics seem to believe was still the formidable power that dominated the skies of Europe in the early years of the war, was down to just 1,024 single engine fighters, 741 bombers, 273 dive-bombers, and 436 reconnaissance planes that were actually operational (a total of 2,474 planes). This constituted a meager inventory for an air force that had responsibilities from the Arctic Circle to North Africa and from the Caucasus to the

Atlantic coast, in addition to its role in protecting the German homeland. Surprisingly, the September

1942 count of operationally ready aircraft of all types is actually 30% less than the “defeated” Luftwaffe that the Allies had to deal with in the late spring of 1944.48 Worse yet for the Luftwaffe was that the acute fuel shortage had forced it to cut back drastically on the training of new pilots.49 Even though the number of operational aircraft continued to fall during the closing months of 1942, the paltry output of

Luftwaffe pilot schools could not keep up. In the two-month period between the end of September and the end of November, for example, even though the Luftwaffe lost just 108 fighter pilots, the number of such pilots fully ready for duty actually declined.50 Not surprisingly, one important study of German air power concludes that in the fall of 1942 “in terms of its operational ready rate, its force structure, and its attrition thus far in the year, the Luftwaffe was dangerously overextended.”51

German Army in the West was also far from the powerful force some authors would lead us to believe. German military leaders planning the invasion of Russia in the period following the fall of

26 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra France in the summer of 1940 fully anticipated that they would decisively defeat the Soviet Union well before the end of a single campaign season. With such expectations there was little reason to build powerful coastal defenses on a large scale. Britain’s weak offensive potential at the time did not necessitate tying down for such defensive purposes first-class military units that might better be employed in the upcoming campaign in the East. The Germans, therefore, decided to garrison occupied

France with a mixture of standard, but not necessarily top-flight, infantry divisions along with a number of new formations organized specifically for the purposes of fixed defense along the French coastlines.

These new bodenständig or “static” divisions – with divisional numbers between 302 and 340 and called up as part of the 13th and 14th divisional mobilization waves in October and November of 1940 – were not equipped to the same standard as was a typical German infantry division.52 Instead of the normal thirty-six 105mm and twelve 155mm artillery pieces, these divisions often had to make do with captured equipment.53 The 320th Division, responsible for the defense of the Cotentin Peninsula in 1942 was, for example, equipped with just twelve 80mm and twenty-four 100mm guns, both of which types dated from the pre-World War One Austrian-Hungarian Army.54 Not only did these static divisions have almost no motor transport, they did not even have a sufficient allocation of horses to make movement in the field practicable, and contemporaneous British intelligence reports rated these formations as well below average in capability.55 As demands for the Eastern Front mounted, the German Army mobilized a number of divisions in the 15th wave, numbered in the 700’s, that were also specially organized for immobile duty in occupied areas, but even more weakly manned and armed than the earlier static divisions, to share in coastal defense duty in France.56

By the spring of 1942 a trickle of battered divisions began to make their way back from the savage battlegrounds of Soviet Russia to the calm of occupied France. These units, among them Panzer, and, later Waffen-SS type divisions, often amounted to mere shells of the powerful formations that had

27 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra ventured forth into the Soviet Union the previous summer. In France they now were to rebuild themselves with new personnel and weapons before eventually returning to more active fronts, which at that time typically meant back to Russia. Nevertheless, by the spring of 1942 of the eighteen German divisions guarding the 1,780 miles of coastline of German occupied France and Holland, eleven were of the of the inferior 13th and 14th waves (early 300 series) and six were from the even weaker 15th wave

(700 series).57 In Normandy, the Germans had only two of these low-quality divisions, the 320th, responsible for almost 200 miles of coastline on the Cotentin Peninsula, and the 716th, just to the east in the Calvados.

In view of the importance of the war in the East and the relative dearth of German military forces, it is not surprising that in August 1942 Hitler made it clear to his generals that there could be only one military front for Germany: the Eastern Front. Other areas, Hitler stated, would have to make do with

“slight forces.”58 In the spring of 1942, he had even allowed that, due to the limited manpower situation in the West, some parts of the coastlines of occupied Europe might only be patrolled rather than manned by defenders.59 The German army had already begun regularly combing units in the west for replacements to make up for the huge losses its forces suffered in the east as far back as late 1941.60 In addition, the diversion of large number of Luftwaffe service personnel in 1942 into Luftwaffe field divisions – another consequence of the manpower shortage that existed at that time – had a negative effect on both service performance and security of Luftwaffe installations, while producing divisions of poor fighting quality.61 The Luftwaffe command in the West complained in October of 1942 that sizeable diversions of Luftwaffe personnel, including Flak training units, had seriously affected its ability to protect airfields and other Luftwaffe installations in areas under its command.62 The growing demands of the active fronts for men and equipment during the middle of 1942 meant that German defenses in the West sank to an all-time low.63 Not only had the overall quality of the German divisions

France, half the number of the spring of 1944. The quality of German formations in the West in the spring of 1944 showed significant overall improvement, on the other hand, with at least twenty-four divisions rated as fit for duty in the east, including thirteen infantry, two parachute and nine of the ten

Panzer or Panzer Grenadier divisions.64

In the fall of 1942, aside from the weak static divisions, there were only three operational Panzer divisions, two Waffen SS motorized divisions and four infantry division in the West, all in various stages of rebuilding. An indication of the state of rebuilding of at least some of these divisions can be seen in the fact that the two motorized Waffen SS divisions then in reserve and undergoing rehabilitation in France in 1942 did not begin to return to Russia until several weeks after the envelopment of German forces at Stalingrad produced a grave crisis on the Eastern Front, even though the lateness of the season and the Anglo-American landings in North Africa meant that a substantial cross-Channel invasion was out of the question for months to come. In 1942 there were no more than 300-400 German medium tanks in France, of which no more than 100 would have been equipped with high-velocity 75mm guns.65

By the time of OVERLORD the number of German armored fighting vehicles in the West included nearly 1,500 medium and heavy tanks, and around 500 assault guns, all of which carried high-velocity

75mm or 88mm guns.66 In the context of 1942, however, the number of tanks in the West was of lesser significance than it would be in 1944. Whereas in 1944 the Allies extended their landing area for

OVERLORD far enough to the east to include suitable tank country, in 1942 the early fighting would have been entirely in the hedgerows or other terrain, such as marshes, that was wholly unsuited to massed armored action. Not surprisingly, the deployment plans for the three Panzer divisions in France in the fall of 1942 show that the Germans were reluctant to entangle their large armored formations in the thickets of the Norman bocage: even in the case of a landing near the Cherbourg area, 6th, 7th, and 10th

29 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra Panzer Divisions would all deploy outside the hedgerow country – well south of the neck of the peninsula.67 The historian who claims that a cross-Channel attack in 1942 would have found a “more substantial,”68 German defense than what would exist in 1944 has clearly gotten his facts wrong. The ability of Germany to resist a significant new enemy initiative in the West in 1942 was, on the contrary, extremely limited.

An invasion in the west in the fall of 1942 would have presented Hitler with a seemingly insoluble dilemma: divert some of his already overextended army and air forces from the east and jeopardize his best, and perhaps last, chance to seize significant oil producing resources, or risk letting the Western

Allies build up powerful forces in France with all of the military and political dangers that would entail.

Stoking Hitler’s fears about a possible Second Front were an increase in railroad and cable sabotage in France, and, more importantly, the results of Luftwaffe reconnaissance flights over the English

Channel ports in June of 1942 that appeared to show a huge buildup in Allied landing craft.69 While the

German commander in the West, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, was inclined to dismiss these findings as an obvious attempt at deception (since the British had apparently done nothing in the way of concealment), Hitler inflated their significance far beyond the actual capabilities the western Allies then possessed.70 Hitler was so concerned about the threat an invasion in the West would constitute, he decided in July that in the event of a major enemy landing he would personally take over command of

Wehrmacht forces there.71 The extent of his inflation of Anglo-American capabilities is reflected in the claim he made during an 8 August meeting with a group of staff officers that the enemy already possessed 3-4,000 landing craft and could land as many as 300,000 men in the first three days of an invasion.72 In the light of Hitler’s current state of mind, a British deception operation may have found a receptive audience, even if the audience was but one, albeit very important, man. If Hitler truly believed the figure of 100,000 enemy troops landed a day and was not merely exaggerating for effect, he had

30 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra effectively already accomplished in his own vivid imagination what an entire staff of Allied intelligence officers could only dream of doing. During the 8 August meeting (which was perhaps the first meeting in which he outlined his concept of an “Atlantic Wall”) he also declared that in conjunction with an amphibious assault he expected feints in the form of multiple diversionary amphibious landings, that antitank weaponry along the coast was wholly inadequate, that an estimated another eight to twelve divisions were needed to secure the coastline, that reserves in the West were insufficient, and that it would take two to three days to move to an invasion site such reserves as did exist.

Hitler convened two more meetings over the course of the next two months during which he expounded further on his ideas on the related subjects of a new Atlantic Wall and the threat that a

Second Front in the West represented. Despite Hitler’s exaggerated appreciation of Anglo-American amphibious capabilities, these meetings demonstrated that he clearly understood the threat a Second

Front in the west would pose. He declared at a 13 August meeting regarding the Atlantic Wall that the establishment of a Second Front must be avoided under all circumstances. At another Atlantic Wall conference on 29 September, he warned that such an eventuality would force him to draw off divisions and air power from the East, causing a “dissipation of our power.” He also acknowledged that in the

West the Allies would enjoy “absolute” superiority in the air during an invasion of northwest Europe.

Whereas he had once boasted to his generals in the wake of the conquest of Poland that for the first time in many decades Germany did not face the threat of a two-front war, he now had to admit, within days of when the SLEDGEHAMMER landings would have taken place, that “a major landing of our enemies in

Western Europe, would bring us to a thoroughly critical position.”73

The German Navy’s thinking regarding threats in the West may also have affected a German response to SLEDGEHAMMER. The German Naval Staff issued a study on 20 July 1942 that claimed that the loss of cargo tonnage due to U-Boat activity would force the western Allies to deal with that threat

31 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra first before undertaking a full-scale Second Front. Echoing the opinion of OB West’s (OB West was the command in charge of German forces in the West) Chief of Staff, Gen. Kurt Zeitzler, who had already opined that the recently detected buildup of landing boats in southern English ports portended a landing in Normandy that would serve as a diversion for a bigger operation aimed at the destruction of U-Boat bases in Brittany, the Navy report claimed that the forces detected in the Channel ports must be a deception covering a larger force meant for Brittany. Hitler himself had expressed opinions along the same lines earlier that same year. According to the Navy report, an invasion of Normandy should be regarded as a ploy designed to draw defenses away from the U-Boat bases in Brittany. The Navy therefore insisted that in the event of an Allied landing in Normandy, no troops should be moved from

Brittany to reinforce the north. Furthermore, in order to protect its bases on the French Atlantic coast, the Navy planned to reposition many of its submarines to block an expected follow-up operation aimed at Brittany. Not only did this promise to disrupt the U-Boat campaign in the Atlantic by redeploying boats to an area where they were unlikely to encounter any Allied shipping, it also may have proved a boon to Allied anti-submarine efforts since it would mean that German U-Boats would voluntarily be sailing into an area within easy range of the strongest antisubmarine force in the world. Since most if not all of the German fighter force in the West would be more than fully engaged in air actions over northern France, the opportunities for Allied antisubmarine aircraft ought to have been excellent. British intelligence had already in early June, on the basis of troop dispositions in France, discerned that the

Germans were most nervous about an Allied invasion of Brittany for the purposes of destroying the U-

Boat bases located there, thus the Allies were aware of the German preoccupation that could serve to

74 shape a successful deception operation to cover SLEDGEHAMMER.

Complicating the situation for the Germans was the profound “crisis of confidence that developed in the German leadership” by the fall of 1942.75 The spectacular German advances of the early summer

32 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra had convinced Hitler that victory was all but won. Surprisingly, this only made him more anxious about the possibility of an amphibious attack in the west, as that may have seemed to him the only way that the

Allies could snatch complete victory from him.76 Hitler consequently wanted to move more divisions to the west to guard against such an eventuality. As the impressive German advances of the early summer began to grind to a halt, Hitler became more and more frustrated with his generals.77 Tension over the proper deployment of ground units, especially as it related to Hitler’s desire to transfer German divisions for the Eastern Front to the West, was a significant factor in the wrangling that took place between

Hitler and his generals and thus was a contributing factor in the breakdown in relations that took place at that time.78

One of the more significant results of this crisis was the unexpected promotion in late September of

Zeitzler – up until then, the Chief of Staff to Rundstedt – to the position of Chief of the German General

Staff.79 If Hitler had forgotten his fears of a possible Allied operation directed against his U-boat bases in Brittany, in the wake of a landing in Normandy, Zeitzler would surely have reminded him, if the

Navy had not already done so. Less than three weeks after Zeitzler’s appointment Hitler’s anxieties about an invasion in the West reappeared. Amazingly, on 5 October, the afternoon of the very day that the SLEDGEHAMMER plan had identified as being among the most favorable for launch, Hitler personally ordered a higher state of alert in the West based on intelligence pointing to an immanent invasion in Normandy. A few days later, contrary to the expressed opinion of Rundstedt, Hitler ordered the emergency redeployment to Normandy of the 1st and 2nd SS Divisions, which were currently based near Paris and Angers respectively. The 1st SS Division moved rapidly to a position southeast of Caen, while the 2nd SS Division just as quickly joined up with elements of the division that had already moved into the area south of St. Lô.

British, as was their practice with cancelled operations, rolled it into a deception operation to cover

TORCH. The British soon implemented a plan to make the Germans believe that an invasion of northwest France was in the works in order to keep in that area as many German units as possible.80 A double agent relayed to his German contacts false information regarding British and American deployments in southern England. The British had tugged on Hitler’s strings and he jumped. This

British intelligence success tells us a number of things. The first is that, since the British were feeding the Germans information designed to convince them into believing an invasion was in the works, a further buildup for SLEDGEHAMMER would not likely have prompted deployment differences on the other side of the Channel.81 The second is that the British had demonstrated the ability to readily deceive and manipulate Hitler. Logically this ought to have been easier at this point of the war than later, since each instance of successful deception on the part of British intelligence would make succeeding attempts all the more difficult. We also get a preview of how the Germans would transport their troops to Normandy at that time. As expected, part of the motorized SS Divisions traveled by road, but other significant parts, most importantly the tracked vehicle component, went by rail. These units were indeed vulnerable to interdiction by the severing of rail lines by aerial bombing or sabotage.

It is perhaps significant that none of the Panzer divisions moved as part of this redeployment. Since two of the three Panzer divisions in the West were already well placed to counter an Allied effort in

Brittany (as had been the 2nd SS Division before its move to Normandy), this might indicate that Hitler indeed feared a two-stage operation – Normandy followed by Brittany – of the type that Zeitzler and the

Navy predicted. Leading with his Waffen SS divisions would have the added benefit, from Hitler’s point of view, of offering the opportunity for his favored, more ideologically pure military units to burnish their reputation at the expense of the “reactionaries” in the regular German Army that Hitler was

34 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra currently at odds with. It was also in accord with Hitler’s ideas on how to deal with the possibility of a diversionary landing – strike hard and quickly so that the weaker diversions would reveal themselves by their rapid defeat. Hitler also regarded his SS Division as “fire brigades” that could rush in to deal with a crisis, though not necessarily capable of continuous front-line fighting.

It also may have been a case of making a virtue out of necessity. Over and above the unsuitability of sending armored formations into the hedgerow country of Normandy, there was still the problem of finding enough fuel to redeploy them anywhere at all. In yet another sign of the depth of the fuel crisis, the fuel reserves of 7th Panzer division on 6 October stood at just a few thousand gallons. On the 1st of the same month 7th Panzer had already found it impossible to undertake even an action as routine as a reconnaissance of expected deployment routes due to fuel shortages. Its supply of fuel fell even further in the following days, until by the 17th the supply records of 7th Panzer Division show less than 1,000 gallons of fuel available to feed its tanks.82 It is no wonder then that even though the German Seventh

Army put its coastline defenses, which comprised all of Normandy and Brittany, at a higher state of readiness on the night of October 17-18 in anticipation of an enemy landing, it forbad the use of any fuel in its execution.83 It seems as though an invasion of France in the early fall of 1942 would truly have found the German defenders there, to use Hitler’s own words, in a “generally critical situation.”

The foregoing discussion is at variance with the conclusions of a significant segment of the World

War Two literature. Most historians who have express an opinion on the matter have agreed that the cancellation of SLEDGEHAMMER was fortunate since it would, in their opinion, have likely led to a disastrous failure. Many have cited the fiasco of the large-scale British-Canadian raid on Dieppe that operated under the code-name JUBILEE and took place on 19 August 1942, as sufficient evidence of the futility of SLEDGEHAMMER. For these authors, Dieppe demonstrated that the Western Allies had no reasonable hope of securing a beachhead on the French coast, much less waging a campaign on the far

35 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra side of the English Channel. Significant differences between SLEDGEHAMMER and JUBILEE in planning, operational objectives and resources make meaningful comparisons between these two operations problematic, however.

The differences in the terrain characteristic to the respective SLEDGEHAMMER and JUBILEE landing sites represent by themselves significant factors of dissimilarity. At Dieppe, high, sheer bluffs both to the east and west of the city dominate the main landing area where Canadian soldiers came ashore. The buildings near the shoreline of the port and directly in front of the main landing area also represented a considerable obstacle to an invading force. German soldiers, dug into extremely well protected positions in both of the bluffs and in well-protected buildings and other prepared sites in the city itself, were able to pour fire from numerous machine guns, mortars and direct-fire artillery pieces on the invading troops from three sides, with devastating effect. One historian has aptly described the ground at both Dieppe and OMAHA Beach, where Germans defenders would later also inflict shockingly high casualties on an invading Allied force, as “amphitheaters of death” since both are characterized by rising terrain overlooking a crescent-shaped beachfront.84

The terrain at Madeleine Beach – the shoreline on the eastern coast of the Cotentin Peninsula where the main SLEDGEHAMMER force was due to land – could not be more different from that at Dieppe, however. The beach itself runs nearly parallel to the shoreline. The defender there has nothing like the high chalk cliffs at Dieppe or the rising bluffs at OMAHA, which offered the respective defending forces such great advantages. Neither are there any built up urban areas like what the JUBILEE force encountered at Dieppe. Facing any force landing at Madeleine is a relatively low and narrow sand dune that runs for miles in either direction. In general, the terrain on the east coast of the Cotentin Peninsula forced the Germans to place their defensive positions near the water’s edge where they were difficult to conceal and which offered the defender poor fields of fire with which to engage a hostile force landing

36 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra from the sea, once they had reached the cover of the sand dunes.85 An invading soldier landing on such a beach would, as soon as he reached the base of the sand dune, find himself not only protected from direct fire, but in good position to take advantage the of micro-terrain features of the dune to safely move to the flanks and rear of the enemy’s coastline defensive positions. The terrain differed little along the entire eastern coast of the Peninsula, from the Carentan estuary to the south, to Morsalines, more than ten miles to the north. Nor were there any rivers, mountains or other geographical features that might inhibit the movement of a force that had landed off course.

ASLEDGEHAMMER landing at Madeleine Beach would have differed from the one at Dieppe in other critical respects, including the number and concentration of defending troops as well as the quantity and quality of weapons. The German defenses at Dieppe included one pioneer (engineer) and two infantry battalions, two pioneer companies, some headquarters and miscellaneous troops, three artillery batteries, eight beach defense guns, a heavy anti-aircraft battery and four sections of light anti- aircraft guns – a force of at least 1,200 to 1,400 men – to defend a strip of coastline just 3-4 miles

86 wide. OMAHA Beach had some 1,100 high-quality troops watching over a 4-mile beachfront, which also featured up to fourteen resistance nests.87 By contrast, the defenses at Madeleine Beach were very weak. A single infantry company of the independent 17th Machinegun Battalion, barely 150 men, was responsible for the six-mile coastal sector to the north. One platoon, however, was kept in reserve miles to the northwest, leaving only 100 or so troops spread out over a five-mile beachfront.88 Any invading force landing at the southern mile or so of this sector would have found nothing more than the odd

German soldier on patrol, since for lack of troops this part of the peninsula coastline was otherwise left undefended. Even if we consider the real possibility of a navigation error resulting in the landing troops arriving on the beaches where some defenders were present, the German troops there would be facing a disadvantage in manpower of at least 5 to 1 – and probably better than 10 to 1 – on terrain highly

37 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra unfavorable for the defense. Moreover, unlike at Dieppe there were no nearby reserves of any consequence with which to administer a counterstroke. On the basis of the evidence, therefore, the likelihood of a Dieppe-style massacre on the SLEDGEHAMMER beaches was virtually nil.

An examination of the events of D-Day 1944 on OMAHA and UTAH beaches further illustrates the problem with drawing parallels between to seemingly similar operations like SLEDGEHAMMER and

JUBILEE. The American troops who landed at OMAHA encountered terrain that was, as already noted, remarkably similar to that at Dieppe. Men crossing the beach at OMAHA, like those at Dieppe, had to brave fire from multiple machine guns, mortars and artillery pieces. As at Dieppe, the Germans had prepared to greet an invader at OMAHA with a murderous hail of fire from above and from both flanks.

Although the Americans at OMAHA did prevail in the end, they paid a price in blood that rivaled that of

Dieppe.

Just across the Bay of the Seine, the experiences of American troops at UTAH were entirely different.

Though virtually all the men landing there were inexperienced troops (half of the force on OMAHA, by contrast, came from the veteran 1st Infantry Division), who had prepared for a shorter period of time, and who made an initial assault substantially smaller than at OMAHA, they still managed in a matter of minutes to brush aside the opposition while sustaining relatively few casualties. Thus, the invasion forces at OMAHA and UTAH, even though they were quite similar in training, equipment and operational goals, encountered quite different experiences on the battlefield. The most crucial difference had been

89 the terrain. Whereas the terrain at OMAHA bore a great resemblance to that of Dieppe, both of these landing sites differ dramatically in this crucial respect from UTAH.UTAH, on the other hand, did resemble the proposed SLEDGEHAMMER landing site for the very good reason that the UTAH Beach landings took place almost exactly at the same place: Madeleine Beach. Whether by luck or intelligence, the SLEDGEHAMMER planners in 1942 had chosen almost precisely the same area as the

Though both the SLEDGEHAMMER and OVERLORD plans involved landings in the general area of

Madeleine Beach, there remained significant differences that generally ran in favor of SLEDGEHAMMER.

Even though a SLEDGEHAMMER amphibious force would necessarily have been far smaller than the overall OVERLORD force, the actual initial SLEDGEHAMMER main landing force, since it was concentrated in one area, would have been nearly twice as large as that of the UTAH invasion force: 620 vs. approximately 1100 men. Secondary commando landings further up the coast would add hundreds

90 more to this total. The UTAH Beach landing force also had to contend with a defense that was far stronger in other ways as well. The Germans had used the twenty-month reprieve to turn the beachfront that ran the length of the eastern Cotentin Peninsula from a sector with only five prepared defensive positions – most too far apart to allow for effective covering fire in the gaps – to one that featured eighteen prepared defensive positions, each of them tied into a system of interlocking fire.91 Moreover, the defensive positions of 1942, typically nothing more than improved field works, were over time transformed by tons of concrete and steel into substantial crenellations in the Atlantic Wall. A German situation map of the Cotentin Peninsula from September 1942 shows that of the twenty-six defensive positions planned for the sector around Madeleine Beach, only one has begun to be built.92 The number of troops defending these beaches also increased from two companies to two battalions supported by a third battalion in local reserve (although it was an Ost battalion – generally unreliable volunteers culled from captured Soviet troops and in this case consisting of Georgian troops of limited combat value). By the spring of 1944, 700 men of the 919th Grenadier Regiment defended roughly the same six-mile frontage (including Madeleine Beach) that 150 men had defended in 1942.93 The men of the 17th

Machinegun Battalion had never seen action, whereas the commander of the 919th Grenadiers could

39 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra count on a number of “excellent officers with experience on the Eastern Front.”94 In the opening months of 1944, the Germans set up a large numbers of beach obstacles along the coast, which promised to have greatly strengthened the defensive potential there as well.95 Nevertheless, the commanding officer of the units stationed on the beaches of the eastern Cotentin Peninsula in 1944 maintained that even this strengthened defense did not constitute a true “main line of resistance,” but rather represented nothing more than a “line of security.”96 Such a description was all the more apt for the state of defenses on

Madeleine Beach in 1942 when the forces manning most of the defenses on the southeast coast of the

Cotentin Peninsula, were not only far fewer in number, but also consisted of personnel drawn from low- quality border and security units.97

Another important difference related to the depth of the defenses. Despite the fact that German defensive positions were well placed at Dieppe in terms of concealment and fields of fire, the invading forces in most areas were able to carry a significant portion of the forward defenses by knocking out numerous machine gun nests and pillboxes. The problem for the attackers, however, was that eliminating these positions still left them under fire from yet other positions to their front and on one or both flanks. The Germans at Dieppe also benefited from the fire of local artillery units as well as the intervention of a substantial number of local reserves. The situation at OMAHA Beach was quite similar.

Even when the assault troops managed to knock out one defensive position they would still remain under the direct and intense enfilading and defilading fire from yet other positions located in the surrounding bluffs, as well as indirect fire from divisional artillery. Moreover, those troops that did finally make it to the top of the bluffs surrounding OMAHA Beach soon had to cope, like the troops at

Dieppe, with arriving German reinforcements.

A comparison of the situations at Madeleine Beach in 1942 and 1944 offers additional evidence that the SLEDGEHAMMER invasion force would have enjoyed crucial advantages. Even in 1944, the terrain

Americans who landed there dealt with German resistance in short order. Once off the beaches, however, they ran into a full German infantry division, the 91st Luftlande Division, which was positioned in reserve in the center of the peninsula. The two airborne divisions the Americans had dropped in the night before had been able to distract and confuse the 91st Division sufficiently to prevent it from immediately counterattacking the beaches, but the paratroops had landed in such a scattered fashion that they were not at first able to inflict serious damage on the defending Germans. The

American troops advancing from the beach soon found themselves tangling in the Norman hedgerows with elements of the nearly intact 91st as well as parts of the two other divisions then defending the peninsula, and a regiment of elite German paratroops.

ASLEDGEHAMMER invasion force would have faced a far smaller challenge. Allied troops, after disposing of the feeble shoreline defenses at Madeleine Beach, would have found the way wide open in front of them. Leaving aside the thin line of units tied down in beach defenses just to the north and south, there was not a single German infantry or armored formation as large as a company within 15 miles of Madeleine Beach. The one-thousand tanks and other vehicles due to touch down at first light as part of the first follow-up landings for SLEDGEHAMMER could have driven across miles of Norman countryside, a journey that in 1944 required many days of hard, vicious and bloody fighting, before they encountered a single German formation of any consequence.98

A comparative breakdown of German units deployed on the Cotentin Peninsula above the narrow neck where the SLEDGEHAMMER forces would have attempted to isolate their bridgehead, shows just how much the Germans had strengthened their defenses there by 1944. In the fall of 1942, the Germans had seven infantry battalions on the peninsula, all of relatively low quality, little training, and no combat experience; by June of 1944, they had twenty-five infantry battalions (not counting three Ost battalions),

41 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra including the reinforced 7th Army Sturm Battalion, three battalions of elite paratroops, plus an independent panzer battalion and another, smaller panzer detachment. There was also an additional independent artillery regiment and a Nebelwerfer Regiment on the peninsula as well, over and above the artillery organic to the three divisions there. As we have already seen, in 1944 the Germans had sufficient strength on the peninsula to place a substantial number of units – at least twelve battalions – in reserve, even while maintaining forces on the beaches far stronger than those found in 1942. The

Germans committed a total of five infantry battalions to the east coast of the peninsula, one of which, the

7th Army Sturm Battalion, was nearly as powerful in men and weaponry as all of the field infantry units that guarded the same coastal sector in 1942.99 In 1942, on the other hand, the Germans deployed most of their available units in and around the important port of Cherbourg, well away from the main

SLEDGEHAMMER landing area. The only German formations that could block an Allied attempt to isolate the peninsula at its neck were elements of one infantry battalion of the 320th Infantry Division scattered over the length of the western coastal areas, and one other battalion of the same division concentrated near the west coast around the town of Le Haye du Puits. Illustrative of the dearth of available reserves, this latter battalion was subordinated to the LXXXXIV Army Corps (the German command responsible for the defense of Normandy), which, together with yet another infantry battalion of the 320th, constituted the sole corps reserve in the entire Normandy sector.100

The disposition of German troops in 1942 is also indicative of another important factor that the

SLEDGEHAMMER skeptics inexplicably fail to account for in their critique: the German doctrine of

Schwerpunkt. This well-known concept, which goes back explicitly at least as far as the writings of

Clausewitz, was the organizing principle that informed most all offensive and defensive German military operations and deployments.101 The famous maxim of Frederick the Great captures the essence of Schwerpunkt as it relates to the defensive mode of warfare: “He who would defend all, defends

42 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra nothing…little minds want to defend everything, sensible men concentrate on the essential.”102 It is interesting to note in this regard how more than one German officer recited this very dictum in their discussions of their army’s defensive preparations in Normandy in 1944.103 It is clear from both the dispositions of the 320th Division defending the Cotentin Peninsula and those of the 302nd Division defending the coastline in the Dieppe region as well as from relevant German documents, that the

Schwerpunkt of each of those areas was the main port, i.e., Cherbourg and Dieppe respectively. In both areas the local commander recognized he could not defend everything, so he concentrated his men and other military resources on defending the essential. At Dieppe, even as the main attacking force was pinned down by heavy fire in front of the port itself, other landing groups just a few miles away encountered few or even no defenders at all at their landing zones. For anyone familiar with the German doctrine of Schwerpunkt this would not come as a surprise, nor would the fact that an Allied landing more than twenty miles away from the obvious Schwerpunkt of Cherbourg would encounter little or no opposition. The mistake the SLEDGEHAMMER skeptics have made is to blithely assume that the defenses at Dieppe were somehow typical for the entire French coastline when in reality it was not even typical for the areas directly adjacent to Dieppe itself. It is true that by the time of OVERLORD, Hitler and Rommel had muddied the doctrinal waters considerably by adopting a waters-edge defensive scheme (and so were, in the opinion of many of their contemporaries, guilty of precisely the sin

Frederick the Great had condemned), but the very controversy that sprung up around this innovation only serves to highlight how German defensive doctrine up till that time never contemplated meeting in strength an invading force at every possible landing site.

Yet, even without a detailed knowledge of German doctrine, of the actual dispositions of troops on the Cotentin Peninsula, or of the flanking landings at Dieppe, an objective observer should have been able to arrive at the conclusion that the defensive dispositions at Dieppe were not typical for the entirety

43 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra of the French coastline. One need only consider that a division of ten to twelve thousand men could not possibly maintain the kind of ratio of force to space that existed at Dieppe along the whole of the 70 kilometer length of Pas de Calais coastline the 302nd Division was responsible for defending, much less along the whole of the 300 kilometers of coastline the 320th Division guarded in Normandy. A reckoning of total available German divisions in France against the extent of its coastline would also have led to a similar conclusion.

Just as Omaha Beach proved the exception on 6 June 1944, so Dieppe was the exception in 1942.

The favorable defensive terrain the Germans enjoyed at both of these locations made them much more formidable places to attack than what was typical for much of the rest of the French coastline. A comparison of the contemporaneous state of the defenses at Dieppe and Madeleine Beach shows that the former was even more exceptional in relative terms.

Dieppe was out of the ordinary not just from the German defensive perspective, however. The

Allied operational plan for JUBILEE also varied considerably from other contemporaneous plans. The preliminary plans for Operation ROUNDUP called for simultaneous landings near a number of smaller ports on the Pas de Calais coastline, yet none of them called for the main attacking force to make a

104 frontal attack on the ports themselves. The SLEDGEHAMMER plan itself involved numerous iterations.

Earlier versions included plans for landing in the Pas de Calais area, near Le Havre, and in areas on the

Cotentin Peninsula other than at Madeleine Beach. None of the variants of SLEDGEHAMMER involved frontal attacks on ports or any other area where the British expected to find substantial concentrations of

German defenders. Indeed, the original plan for JUBILEE itself envisioned the main attacks coming on the flanks of Dieppe, not on the port itself. The rationale for each of these was the same: land where there promises to be little opposition. Thus, it is evident that British amphibious doctrine that informed

44 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra the SLEDGEHAMMER plan normally required that landings take place on weakly defended coastal areas to avoid when possible the risks inherent in frontal attacks on well-defended positions.105

Why then did the main Dieppe landing force attempt a frontal landing? The answer to this question lies in the strategy behind the raid. Since JUBILEE was by definition a time-limited operation, it soon became evident to its planners that forces landing on the flanks probably would not have sufficient time to capture its objectives and still withdraw in time to successfully evacuate. The concern was that if the raiding force proved unable to capture a recognizably important point (such as an airfield or division headquarters), the public would see it as a failure. Consequently, the JUBILEE planners changed the

106 plan, moving the main weight of the attack to a frontal assault of the port. When the JUBILEE planners changed the raid into one emphasizing a frontal attack they attempted to compensate for the stronger resistance the main landing force was likely to encounter by adding additional firepower. They requested supporting naval and aerial bombardments. The Royal Navy declined to supply a battleship because it feared its loss would entail a public relations disaster that would more than cancel out any successes the raiding force itself might achieve. The request for aerial bombardment also received a veto on the grounds that it might kill too many French civilians and also would fill the streets of Dieppe

107 with rubble that would hinder any advance inland. The history of the JUBILEE planning process demonstrates clearly that it was the strategy of limited raids that forced distortions in the JUBILEE plan and that it was these very distortions – the frontal attack on a well-defended position without adequate preparatory bombardment – that led to the disastrous outcome. An overly ambitious strategy was not the cause of the disaster at Dieppe, but rather an overly cautious one that depended too little on obtaining real and lasting advantage over the enemy, and too much on artificial time constraints and scoring public relations points.

45 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra A similar strategic flaw lay behind the other military debacle that many SLEDGEHAMMER skeptics cite in their critique – the defeat of American forces at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia in February of 1943.

The lessons of Kasserine for these skeptics are much the same as those for Dieppe: the fighting skill of the Allied militaries was not yet high enough to take on the Germans on the continent of Europe and, therefore, a period of preparation in the less demanding theater of the Mediterranean was necessary before the Allies could successfully attempt a major cross-Channel operation. According to this view both Allied leaders and men – and for many historians this meant primarily the Americans – needed the experience they would obtain during the Mediterranean campaign before they would be ready to take on the German enemy across the English Channel.

As in the case of Dieppe, a closer examination of the evidence reveals a more complex reality. To begin with, Allied dispositions in Tunisia constituted yet another instance in which a defending force attempted to defend everything and ended up defending nothing. The deployment of the American forces also violated the principle that military formations ought to be positioned so that their constituent parts can fight as a unit. With bits and pieces of various units parceled out in a patchwork of remote positions that did not offer mutual support, the Allies were poorly positioned to deflect a major blow in and around Kasserine. The primary cause for this situation was not ignorance of the military principles involved due to inexperience, but rather the difficult logistical situation the Allies found themselves in

Tunisia. Since the lines of communications from Mediterranean ports to the Tunisian battlegrounds were so tenuous, there was just no way to deliver available resources to the front.108 The American 3rd,

9th Infantry Divisions as well as the 2nd Armored Division were stationed elsewhere in North Africa, but there was no easy way to transport and supply these units, not to mention the many divisions back on the

American mainland, in Tunisia.109 Similarly, while vast quantities of tanks and planes had already been pouring off American assembly lines for months, the Allies could only transport and support a tiny

46 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra fraction to the front lines in Tunisia. The U.S. produced, for example, around 8,000 M-4 Sherman tanks in the last 6 months of 1942, a quantity substantially greater than the total number of tanks on both sides during the Battle of Kursk, putatively the largest tank battle of the war; if only a fraction of these

Sherman tanks had been available near Kasserine in February of 1943 it stands to reason that the battle may have taken a different course altogether.110 Allied logistical difficulties and their problematic dispositions also enabled the Germans – under the leadership of one of their most able field commanders, Erwin Rommel – to fight the kind of battle that maximized his force’s comparative advantages in mobile warfare and at the same time forced the Americans to fight the kind of battle that minimized their own combat strengths based on mass firepower and overall material superiority.

U.S. Air Force First Line Aircraft On Hand - 30 September 1942

9,000 8,298 8,000

7,000

6,000 5,499 5,000 4,319 4,000

3,000 2,799 2,263 2,056 2,000 1,2891,296 9601,049 917 1,000 836 391 329 477 247 81 86 0 US Overseas Totals

Heavy Bombers Medium Bombers Light Bombers Fighters Reconnaissance Total

Source: Air Force Historical Research Agency, Army Air Forces Statistical Digest, World War II, http://www.au.af.mil/AU/AFHRA/aafsd/aafsd_index_table.html (accessed 4 April 2009).

Typically, the engagements that took place in and around Kasserine that were characterized by positional fighting where the Americans could bring their firepower, especially artillery firepower, into

47 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra play, were also those engagements that went in their favor. This was true even at a time when the balance of air power, which for most of the war was stacked heavily in favor of the Allies, tilted in favor of the Germans. Those engagements that developed as mobile operations, on the other hand, usually went in Rommel’s favor. Though the fighting in Tunisia did highlight deficiencies in the Anglo-

American armies, it also demonstrated certain strengths, but the very strategy that had brought the Allies to Tunisia tended to dilute Allied strengths while enhancing the strengths of their German enemy.

Rommel’s evaluation of American combat efficiency at Kasserine differs considerably from the picture many of the SLEDGEHAMMER skeptics paint:

Although it was true that the American troops could not yet be compared with the veteran troops of the Eighth Army, yet they made up for their lack of experience by their far better and more plentiful equipment and their tactically more flexible command…. The tactical conduct of the enemy's defense had been first class. They had recovered very quickly after the first shock and had soon succeeded in damning up our advance by grouping their reserves to defend the passes and other suitable points.111

Despite Rommel’s favorable overview, it would be wrong to suggest that the Americans had not displayed some very real and significant problems during the Tunisian campaign. In their overall evaluation of the North African campaign, however, the SLEDGEHAMMER skeptics often end up cherry- picking their evidence in order to suit their conclusions. It is the ostensible deficiencies of the fighting man at the front, and their more proximate superiors, which receives the greatest weight in their post- campaign analyses. Though they may mention that the Anglo-American forces in Tunisia operated much of the time under conditions where the enemy enjoyed air superiority, that dispositions were poor, that the logistical difficulties in Tunisia were acute, that the organization of command was extremely complex, and that intelligence failures handicapped Allied commanders in their decision making processes, they often ignore these factors when making their overall assessments of the battle. They never squarely deal with the possibility that it was problems in these other areas, peculiar to the circumstances of that particular campaign and often conditioned on the particular underlying strategy

48 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra that brought Allied forces to North Africa, which constituted the chief reasons for American and British difficulties during the campaign in Tunisia. The Byzantine command structure, for instance, was certainly the product of the unique political circumstances in which the Allies found themselves entangled as soon as they arrived in French North Africa. It almost goes without saying, furthermore, that the Americans would have done better if they had had at hand more reserves in men and equipment.

This was not something that American commanders had to learn in North Africa – it is fundamental to the way they wanted to fight to begin with, and, indeed, it represents no more than obvious good sense.

They were prevented from using the maximum available forces due to the inherent logistical limitations involved in conducting a campaign in the area in which their leaders had determined they would fight.

A fair analysis of the North African campaigns strongly points to the conclusion that it was principally the overall strategy – one that had the Allies fighting in a region so remote they could not possibly take advantage of their material advantages, and enabled their enemy to fight in conditions most favorable to him – that caused the setbacks Allied forces experienced there, and that a different strategy represented the best way to counteract the weaknesses in combat power the fighting there exposed.

**********

Though the Anglo-American decision to forego SLEDGEHAMMER meant Hitler’s anxieties about an actual invasion in the West were unfounded, the events that unfolded on the Eastern Front during the coming fall and winter lend genuine credence to his apprehensions about the danger to Germany a

Second Front in Europe would have entailed. Anyone with a modicum of familiarity with the history of

World War II knows about the encirclement and destruction of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad.

What is less well understood, however, is that the Soviets had set their sights on cutting off and

Following the Red Army counteroffensive that kicked off with the envelopment of Stalingrad in late

November, the Soviets made numerous attempts to amputate the entire southern wing of the German army in Russia. At stake was not merely the recapture of home territory, but the fate of three German

Armies: 1st Panzer, 4th Panzer and 17th Armies, totaling as many as 1 million men, easily three times the number trapped at Stalingrad.112 Time and again over the course of the winter, German commanders rushed to the front fresh and newly reequipped divisions that had recently arrived from France to stave off a succession of developing crises. The procession of divisions transferred from France began in earnest with Hitler’s order of 4 November 1942 directing 6th Panzer and two infantry divisions from the west to Russia.113 6th Panzer did not arrive on the Eastern Front until early December, but it quickly became the principle unit involved in the Stalingrad relief effort. The relief drive fell far short of its objectives, but it did play an important part in diverting the extremely powerful Soviet 2nd Guards Army, which the Soviet high command had tasked with providing the final punch in their planned operation to cut off the German southern wing. Consequently, the Soviets had to scale back the operation they hoped would cut off the three German armies in the Caucasus, much to the consternation of at least one top

Soviet commander.114 Significantly, Stalin, in a message to his generals, attributed the scale-back to the fact that the Germans had “brought in from the west a number of infantry divisions and tank formations.”115

Over the following weeks more and more divisions arrived from France, eventually amounting to at least sixteen over the course of the winter. At a time when most German divisions were battered and exhausted from months of hard fighting, the significance of the arrival of these fresh units goes beyond their mere number. Some, like the 6th Panzer and 7th Panzer Divisions (the latter of which arrived in the

The performance of other divisions recently arrived from France did not always live up to the same high standards. The performance of the returning SS Divisions while surpassing that of the recently upgraded

300 series divisions that were also arriving in the East at this time, has to rate as a disappointment, especially given the amount of equipment lavished on them following their November conversion from motorized to Panzer Grenadier divisions and Hitler’s high expectations for them. Their first major movement was in retreat as they were outflanked and outfought by Soviet units composed of a mixture of green recruits and veterans weary from months of fighting in the difficult winter conditions prevalent on the Eastern Front. Ironically, the one shining moment of the returning SS units was a local counterattack that saved from complete annihilation the 320th Division, the former defender of

Cherbourg that had moved east after its conversion to a standard field division just in advance of the SS

Divisions.

The new SS Panzer Corps headquarters that commanded the SS Divisions in Russian also showed that they were not entirely ready for the challenges of a modern battlefield, a fact that became clear after

Red Army troops surrounded the entire SS Panzer Corps at Kharkov. In defiance of Hitler’s order, the commander of the SS Panzer Corps, Gen. Paul Hauser, ordered a breakout to save his command. Even though it was Gen. Hubert Lanz, Hauser’s regular army superior who tried to enforce Hitler’s “no retreat” order, Hitler sacked Lanz while Hauser “failed upwards” to eventual command in 1944 of the

German 7th Army in France during the Battle of Normandy.

During the balance of the winter battles in Russia, however, the SS Panzer Corps fought under the direction of the celebrated Field Marshal Erich von Manstein. While under “adult supervision” the SS

Divisions performance improved considerably. A large part of that was that Manstein shaped the battlefield to give his forces the maximum advantage and turn the tables on the advancing Soviet forces:

51 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra Throughout early February, Manstein developed plans to halt the Soviet advance and restore operational freedom to German forces…. Those plans capitalized on superior German mobility and command flexibility. By permitting an unhindered Soviet advance in some sectors, by holding tightly to a few critical sectors, and by deliberately taking the calculated risk of reducing German forces to a minimum in other sectors, Manstein intended to generate sufficient operational reserves to mount a coordinated counteroffensive.116

They key to Manstein’s concept was to let part of the mobile Soviet forces advance unhindered until they had further exhausted themselves and outrun their logistics. He then planned to spring grand counterattack by means of a triple pincer maneuver. Beginning on 20 February, the 2nd SS Division, with support from the 15th Infantry Division and from 3rd SS Division the following day, would attack from the north in a southeasterly thrust. XXXVIII Panzer Corps, led by 6th Panzer and 17th Panzer divisions, would attack from the south towards the north from about the 23rd of February, after its redeployment to its attack positions. At the same time XXXX Panzer Corps with SS Viking, 7th Panzer

Division and 333rd Infantry Division would also advance northwards along roughly parallel lines to

XXXVIII Panzer Corps. The Germans would thus have three converging axes of attack, which

Manstein reckoned, would throw back the surging, but overextended Soviets in disarray.117

Significantly, all of the division taking part in the initial mobile phase of counterstroke, with the exception of the under-strength 17th Panzer and SS Viking Divisions, were units that had been in France the previous fall.

Manstein’s masterstroke enabled the SS Divisions to operate on terms that maximized their strength.

Sent against the exposed flanks and rear of overextended Red Army units, often stuck, out of fuel on the open steppe, the SS Divisions were in their element, able to exploit their mobility and firepower on favorable ground against poorly defended rear elements. Buoyed by their success, the SS Panzer Corps, like a headstrong child, later returned to its independent ways by launching a series of costly frontal attacks before the spring thaw brought fighting in the East to a halt.

52 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra The experience of the 320th Infantry Division, which Red Army soldiers had earlier reduced to a tattered band of fleeing troops in February 1943 – the same month as Kasserine Pass – proved that it was not only green American troops that could perform badly in their first encounter with real war. The performance of the SS Divisions also demonstrated that, at this point of the war at least, they did not live up to their Übermensch pretensions. They had done well when everything was stacked in their favor and under the direction of sound leadership, but their earlier efforts to realize Hitler’s operational concept that relied too much on ideological fervor and too little on tactical flexibility showed that they were hardly invincible. Admittedly, it is hard to use the performance of these units, which would have constituted the most important fighting formations in the first days of a 1942 Battle of Normandy, as a precise gauge for their performance at another time and place. It must be pointed out, however, that all of these divisions had benefited from significant upgrades in weapons and other equipment as well as additional time to train between the time they entered the battles in the East, and the time when

SLEDGEHAMMER would have taken place. Also, the Red Army units they encountered, while flush with victory, were a mixture of the inexperienced and the worn-out units, and hardly represented the toughest available opposition.

We might glean from the way the final German offensive developed that winter a clue as to how a battle in Normandy might have developed in the unlikely event that Hitler had given his commanders their heads in 1942 or 1944. It will be remembered that the Panzer divisions in France planned, in case of an invasion of Normandy, to deploy well to the south of the Cotentin Peninsula. While certainly this had to do with the fact that the bocage country to the north is quite unsuitable for the effective operation of massed tank formations, it also may have been that the plan at OB West was to lure any Allied invasion inland and then fall on the invaders’ flanks and rear once they had overextended themselves and outran most of their air support, just as Manstein had done in February and March on the Eastern

Dieppe, and which foresaw a penetration as far as Paris in just two days, culminated with a classic

German double envelopment near Beauvais, roughly half way between Dieppe and Paris. The German

Navy appreciation of 20 July 1942, mentioned above, also noted the vulnerability of an Allied drive to the south developing from Normandy to a flanking counterattack.118 The area that the Panzer division planned to deploy to in 1942 in case of a Normandy invasion happens to be almost exactly where

Operation Lüttich – the last desperate German attempt to cut off the American breakout from Normandy

– developed from in August of 1944. Operation Lüttich, therefore, may have represented less a last- minute improvisation than it did the long-standing thinking of some leading German officers about the best way to deal with an Allied invasion. If this had been the concept of Gen. Geyr von Schweppenburg

– the commander of the Panzer units in France in the spring of 1944, and a Panzer Corps commander on the Eastern Front at the time of the Manstein counteroffensive of February-March 1943 – it would be interesting to consider just how effective this approach might have been at that time given the

Americans desire to push inland rapidly following the June landings in 1944.

Be that as it may, the performance of most of the German divisions that deployed to Russia from

France in the winter of 1942-43, while perhaps unspectacular, did play a vital role in the effort to check the Soviet offensives that threatened to engulf the German forces on the Eastern Front. The 6th and 7th

Panzer Divisions, displayed consummate skill throughout, and the SS divisions showed a mixed performance, but one that was indispensable to the German counterattack in the late winter period. A visualization of a map of the German forces at the height of the Manstein counteroffensive of late

February serves as a dramatic illustration of the crucial role the divisions redeployed from France played in the climatic winter battles in southern Russia. Starting on the front lines west of Kharkov on 25

February 1942 we would see, in sequence (formations redeployed from the West in bold): 167th

Panzer Grenadier Division, the balance of 3rd SS Panzer Grenadier Division, 2nd SS Panzer

Grenadier Division, 15th Infantry Division, 267th ID, 6th Panzer, 17th Panzer, SS Wiking, 11th Panzer,

7th Panzer, 333rd Infantry Division, 3rd Panzer, 19th Panzer, 335th Infantry Division, 3rd Mountain, and

304th Infantry Division; in summary six of the eight infantry divisions (counting 3rd Mountain Division in this category) and five of the ten mechanized or armored divisions were units recently redeployed from France. This, however, Panzer or Panzer Grenadier importance that these divisions played in this critical operation since most of the other participating mobile “divisions” had already long since become considerably worn down and by now were at no more than regimental strength119 (moreover, 3rd Panzer,

19th Panzer maintained relatively stationary positions throughout the campaign), whereas the divisions taking part in the counteroffensive that had but recently been in France were often far closer to full strength in men and equipment. Even though these divisions, especially the newer ones without combat experience, suffered inordinate casualties before they came up to speed,120 they did eventually become veteran units, which contributed significantly to German efforts in southern Russia during these winter battles.

It is clear that had an even moderately successful Operation SLEDGEHAMMER been able to tie down most of these divisions in the West through even part of the upcoming winter, the position of German forces on the Eastern Front would have become even more critical than it actually was. There was the real possibility under such circumstances of a Soviet victory that would have dwarfed the one already won at Stalingrad. Such a development could very well have meant an end to the war in 1943. Even if such a dramatic outcome had not been the result, it is evident that by pinning down significant forces in the West, SLEDGEHAMMER would have greatly aided the efforts of the Soviet armed forces. Thus,

**********

Another strategic dimension of the war also favored the Germans more in 1944 than it would in

1942: the state of war production. Some historians have made the mistake of assuming that as each year went by the Allies gained in terms of relative production.121 In a number of important categories, however, quite the opposite was true. American tank production, for example, in terms of quarterly production, actually peaked in the final three months of 1942; by early 1944 it had fallen by more than half.122 The yearly production of U.S. artillery pieces also reached its zenith in 1942 and by 1944 had also fallen by more than one-half. British tank output fell considerably between 1942 and 1944 as well.

German armaments production, on the other hand, surged dramatically upwards during the same time span. Tank production more than doubled and the output of artillery pieces more than tripled. In some important weapons categories the increase was even more dramatic, For example, the production of the

German 105mm field howitzer, the standard artillery piece of German divisions, totaled just 1,269 for all of 1942, but by mid-1944 rose to an average of well over 600 per month.123 Total yearly machine gun production stood at just under 85,000 for 1942, of which 20% were the new MG 42, but by mid-1944 it would rise to some 25,000 per month, of which 80% were MG 42’s.124 In relative terms, the developments are even more dramatic. While in 1942, the Anglo-Americans outproduced the Germans by more than 6 to 1 in artillery, by 1944 the ratio was little better than 1 to 1. In 1942, the Anglo-

Americans held an almost 4 to l advantage in tank production, but by 1944, the Germans had pulled into a virtual tie. In 1942, Britain alone outpaced Germany by more than 50% in the output of aircraft (as it had in both the previous two years), and combined American and British aircraft production was well above 4 to 1 over the Germans. By 1944, however, the Anglo-American advantage shrank to 3 to 1.125

56 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra Nor were the Allies able to keep ahead of the increases in German production, with respect to armaments used in ground warfare at least, by destroying or capturing German weapons in the field.

The number of German tanks, for example, grew by over 75% between July of 1943 and July of 1944.126

The number of Luftwaffe Flak guns on hand increased from 19,815 20mm, 2,054 37mm, and 5,694

88mm guns in September 1942 to 34,313 20mm, 4,235 37mm and 10,370 88mm guns in June of

1944.127 By the beginning of 1944, according to one American official postwar analysis, the German armed forces were actually better armed than they had been before the invasion of Russia in June of

1941.128

Not only did the output of German warplanes surge in 1943, the number of pilots trained also increased as well, more than doubling the number trained in 1942.129 The Luftwaffe’s first line strength rose 50% from the end of 1942 to mid 1943. While the measure of Allied air superiority continued to grow in 1943 and 1944, it was not until 1945 that the Luftwaffe’s first line strength fell below the levels of the second half of 1942.130 The Allies were able to keep ahead of the increased German capabilities in the air war, however. In part this was merely a function of the Allies increasing the deployment of aircraft faster than the Germans could. The introduction in the spring of 1944 of large numbers of effective long-range fighters as escorts for American heavy bombers on missions deep into German airspace also played a vital role in the battle for air supremacy. This development, however, only realized in 1944 what SLEDGEHAMMER promised to bring about in the fall of 1942. The

SLEDGEHAMMER plan called for the intensive use of Allied bombers, accompanied by fighter escort, against airfields and other military targets in Northern France. The only way the Luftwaffe could avoid a war of attrition in the fall of 1942 that they could afford to fight even less than they could in the spring of 1944 (and, due to the much shorted sortie distances involved, on terms more favorable to the Allies) would be to refuse to engage on a wholesale basis – a win-win situation for the Allies.

57 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra The Germans also made more significant overall advances in the quality of its weapons arsenal as well. Whereas most of the weaponry the Allies would use in the war in Europe in 1944 was already in mass production in 1942, the Germans rolled out a number of major new and improved weapons. Most of the tanks Germany produced in 1942 were Mk III’s with 50mm main guns that were just adequate in the antitank role, but too small to fire a HE round of any significance. By 1944, however, all German tanks had a high-velocity gun of 75mm or 88mm, which were not only superior as antitank weapons, but could also fire HE rounds. The

1400

1200

1000 479 500 405 433 611

462 800 15 6 6 100 32 104 92 75 600 45 84 64 6 70 120 80 311 345 4 296 17 80 38 368 400 60 8 179 100 322 88 84 196 155 370 17

113 200 310 320 277 282 284 302 228 250 241 185 194 146

0 Jul-42 Aug-42 Sep-42 Oct-42 Nov-42 Dec-42 Mar-44 Apr-44 May- Jun-44 Jul-44 Aug-44 44

Mk III Mk IV Panther Tiger I Tiger II Assault Guns

59 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra Panther and Tiger tanks that Germany put into full production in 1943 far outclassed in firepower and protection the American Sherman tanks (little improved since 1942) they met in Normandy in 1944.

The Germans also developed two kinds of man-portable anti-tank rockets (the deadly Panzerfaust and

Panzerschreck), naval pressure mines (the “Katy” or “Oyster” mines, which were far more significant in blocking use of Cherbourg harbor in 1944

Increase in Number Flak Weapons (Luftwaffe): September 30, 1942 - June 1, 1944

300% 281%

250%

200%

150%

106% 100% 82% 73%

50%

0% 2 cm (tot. tubes) 3.7 cm Flak 18 u. 8.8 cm 18 u. 36 + 10.5 cm Flak 38 + 36 37 39

than German demolitions131), radio controlled anti-ship weapons, V-1 and V-2 rockets (which had a distorting effect on Allied strategy during their 1944 campaign in Europe132), jet fighter and bomber aircraft, as well as hard to detect plastic and wooden land mines.133 Moreover, advanced weapons that were already in limited use such as the Nebelwerfer rocket launchers, and, above all, the superb MG 42

60 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra light machine gun, became much more ubiquitous by 1944. Most of these new weapons would occupy an important place in the arsenal of the German military during the fighting in Normandy in 1944; none of them were present there in 1942.

In the all-important area of fuel supplies the Germans also made important gains by the time of D-

Day. As already alluded to, in the late summer of 1942, the Germans experienced a fuel crisis the likes of which they would not see until well after the Allied breakout in Normandy almost two years later.134

The fortuitous relative slowdown in military activities by the end of the year allowed the Germans to begin rebuilding their stocks in the short term.135 The gradual rise in synthetic oil production, which increased by one-third between the fall of 1942 and the spring of 1944, together with the unexpected windfall they experienced upon the surrender of Italy – which brought them the double benefit of no longer having to supply their onetime ally with fuel for civilian and military use, as well as the opportunity to seize “surprisingly large stocks” of Italian fuel136 – meant that their position with respect to fuel reserves on the eve of Allied bomber offensive against their oil facilities (which began in earnest only days before D-Day) was the best it had been since 1940.137

Even with respect to military manpower, the Germans made significant gains. In June of 1942, the

German Army consisted of 239 divisions with an average strength of 11,836 men. By mid-1944, however, the number of German divisions had grown to 255 and the average strength to 12,155.138

Given the huge losses the Germans experienced in that two-year period, these statistics seem counterintuitive. Another development, the large increase in the number of foreign workers, however, largely explains this phenomenon. Between 1942 and 1944, the Germans put almost 3 million additional foreign workers to work in their fields and factories.139 For several hundreds of thousands of these workers the Germans again had the surrender of the former Italian ally (one of the major goals of the Allied campaign in the Mediterranean) to thank.140

61 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra By late 1943 things began to change as Hitler, his concerns about the possibility of a cross-Channel invasion renewed, determined to dramatically shift the weight of German military westwards. Despite the huge reverses Germany had suffered, it had survived the great blows it had received at the hands of the Red Army. Hitler had been able to preempt any threat that might have come from the unoccupied zone of France and to master the situation that developed in Italy after that nation’s volte-face. With the unexpected amelioration in the German fuel situation, Hitler felt he could risk further losses of territory in the east. Now that the Western Allies seemed likely to invade somewhere in northwest Europe in

1944, Hitler drew the obvious conclusions. For the coming year, therefore, he declared that the defeat of the expected invasion of northwest Europe by Anglo-American troops would become the first priority for the German armed forces.141 Shortly thereafter, Hitler appointed Rommel to inspect and improve the defenses along the channel coast.142 While Rommel worked energetically to improve the quantity and quality of defenses in the area of his new command, Hitler moved more and more resources to the

West.143 Hitler also decreed that the succession of manpower drafts that had, since late 1941, transferred some of the best troops in the West to units in the East, would halt and actually be reversed. The number of combat divisions in France grew from twenty-five in the fall of 1942 to fifty on the eve of D-

Day, while the number of panzer divisions grew from just three to nine in the same time span.

Normandy itself, which had only two low-quality divisions in 1942, by D-Day had five divisions including both high-quality infantry formations and a panzer division. The quality of personnel also improved significantly in the months before D-Day.144 Though many units in Normandy in 1944 were only able train for a few hours a day, this still represented a vast improvement over the situation for most of 1942 which found German formations stuck in their forward positions on a state of anti-invasion alert for months at a time.145 The anti-aircraft reinforcements Hitler sent to Normandy just weeks prior to the

OVERLORD landings substantially reinforced German defenses against both airborne attack and air

The improvement in German defenses in France proved to be a vexing problem for the OVERLORD planners. It is clear that the OVERLORD planners, in accordance with established British amphibious doctrine, looked for places to land where Germans defenses were weak.147 In 1942, as we have already seen, the SLEDGEHAMMER planners had succeeded admirably in finding a landing site almost completely undefended. In this respect, however, time was working against the OVERLORD Planners.

As Hitler’s plan for an Atlantic Wall moved from dream into at least the initial stages of reality, and following his decision in the fall of 1943 to emphasize defense in the west, weakly defended beaches became fewer and fewer. Through the early part of 1944 OMAHA Beach remained relatively weakly defended. With the movement of the 352nd Division from reserve into forward positions in and around

148 OMAHA Beach, however, the situation changed radically to the detriment of any attacking force. The

nd OVERLORD planners remained ignorant of the movement of the 352 Division until it was too late to change the invasion plan, however.149 The German defenders in this respect, therefore, remained one step ahead of their enemies.

Even when the Allied intelligence was able to discern significant improvements in German defenses, it was not always easy for invasion planners to make adjustments to counter them. Rommel’s addition of numerous mined obstacles to existing beaches defenses proved to be a daunting challenge for the invaders to overcome. The Allies needed to adjust their planning and training to the new reality on the ground. Landing craft capacity that could have carried additional assault troops now was needed to carry special obstacle-clearing engineers.150 If the engineers failed in their obstacle-clearing task, as most did in the face of heavy fire during the opening phase at OMAHA, it would inhibit the ability of follow-on forces to land. Consequently, only an estimated 100 tons of supplies were discharged at

63 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra OMAHA on D-Day, a performance in absolute terms less than that at Fedhala on D-Day for TORCH, even though at Fedhala American forces had to work under handicaps, such as a pounding Atlantic surf and the complete lack of shore-to-shore amphibious craft (such as LST’s and LCT’s), that did not pertain to

151 the situation at OMAHA. In the sphere of planning, the Allies once more seemed to be playing a game of catch-up with their German opponents.

This preceding discussion of the relative merits of the planning SLEDGEHAMMER and OVERLORD runs counter to the SLEDGEHAMMER skeptics’ evaluation of this period. In its simplest form, their argument holds that in the wake of Dieppe and/or Kasserine Pass the Allies learned invaluable lessons without which success in a cross-Channel invasion would have been doubtful if not impossible. More thorough training and better overall planning and preparation, informed by war experience, this narrative maintains, transformed the inadequate Anglo-American fighting men of 1942 into the D-Day-winning fighting men of 1944. It is not enough, however, to show merely that Allied soldiers failed in the earlier battles and succeeded in the later ones to demonstrate that it was the intervening training and “lessons learned” that made the difference. At best this begs any number of questions as to what were the factors involved in improved Allied combat performance. Moreover, without specific and clear examples of how the ostensibly improved training helped the Allies win in Normandy in 1944, the argument risks becoming somewhat circular: Dieppe and Kasserine prove that the Anglo-Americans would not be ready to successfully invade France until they had learned certain lessons, and the proof that they had learned the requisite lessons was that they did later successfully invade France.

It is easy to make the mistake of thinking that more time for planning results in superior preparation.

If anything, OVERLORD shows indications of over-planning. While longer lead-times may mean more planning it does not necessarily mean better planning. The logistical organization of OVERLORD is a case in point. At least three different bureaucracies, complete with their own alphabet-soup acronyms,

64 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra were created to manage the logistics for OVERLORD: BUCO, MOVCO and EMBARCO (whose activities were so at odds with its intended function that it eventually took on the name “Embargo”).

These suffered from the typical bureaucratic maladies of overlapping and ill-defined areas of responsibilities, turf wars during the preparation stage and inefficiency and confusion during actual execution. Planners adopted an elaborate and complicated logistical system that proved unworkable in practice. Under the stress of battle complex plans have a tendency to break down. Unfortunately, the

Allies’ troop movement plan began to break down even before D-Day. The one-day delay in the launching of the invasion caused by bad weather threw the whole troop outloading process into a state of confusion that lasted for several days. With troops piling up in the port assembly area a solution was devised: troops were “simply funnel[ed]…into the ports and onto ships and craft as fast as possible and without regard to craft-loading plans.” The logistical supply system broke down almost immediately as well. After days of frustration, the spectacle of logistical personnel vainly going from ship to ship to search for needed supplies convinced the higher-ups to abandon the new system and go back to what had been typical of earlier operations: unload all incoming cargo on the beaches and sort things out there.152 In short, the elaborate planning process had been largely for naught, but on the spot improvisation that involved dispensing with prepared plans saved the day.

Other innovations for OVERLORD, like the attempt to neutralize beach defenses with heavy bombers, special rocket-firing landing craft, and the swimming DD tank, proved to be dismal failures. Heavy bombers did have the capability of delivering a massive amount of ordinance on a landing zone in a very short amount of time. Unfortunately, Allied bomber crews were not equipped or trained to perform such a task. Above all, they did not have the capability to accurately drop bombs on a target obscured by cloud cover. When American heavy bombers flew high above OMAHA on D-Day they found that they had to bomb through an overcast sky and took extra safety precautions against bombing short and hitting

65 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra their own forces. Not surprisingly their bombs fell wide of the target. The special rocket-firing craft designed to pour concentrated “drenching” fire on the beaches were likewise defeated by the weather.

Accurately aiming the rockets depended on relatively calm seas, but the rough seas on D-Day made this impossible. Like the heavy bombers, the rocket firing craft missed their targets.153 The heavy swell along the Normandy coast also defeated most of the special swimming DD tanks, most of which sank well before making it to shore.154

An examination of the operational planning for OVERLORD does not exhibit the type of progress based on learning from previous experience that many historians would have us believe. The timing of the OVERLORD landings differed completely from previous experience in North Africa and the

Mediterranean. Whereas the OVERLORD plan called for landings to take place at first light, all previous

Anglo-American amphibious operations had taken place at night. At Dieppe, however, one of the two flanking forces, the landing at Puits (Blue Beach), arrived late and therefore the defenders there were able to subject them to the kind of accurate fire that other contingents landing under cover of darkness had been able to avoid. One of the conclusions of a paper presented at the Rattle Conference, called in

1943 to evaluate the lessons of Dieppe for the benefit of the OVERLORD planners, had been that

155 nighttime landings were preferable to daytime ones. During the OVERLORD planning process both

Gen. Leonard Gerow, who command the forces landing at OMAHA and the American naval commander,

Rear Adm. John Hall, pushed for a nighttime landing. Gen. Omar Bradley, the overall commander of

American forces on D-Day, wanted to take advantage of the firepower that the large force of heavy bombers he had at his disposal promised to offer, however. Bradley overruled his subordinates and the landings took place after first light.156 When the preparatory bombing mission failed, the Americans landing at OMAHA, exposed in full daylight, were subjected to devastating direct fire. The engineering

66 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra teams likewise took heavy casualties and the clearing of the beaches on Omaha was severely curtailed, the consequences of which threw the rest of the assault plan into disarray.

It is true that in the Pacific, amphibious operations typically took place during daylight hours. The planners for these landings, however, had learned to compensate for the obvious advantage this gave the defender by employing massive naval bombardments to knock out and suppress sources of enemy fire.

The landings in the Marshall Islands had clearly demonstrated the benefits of this recipe. One of the commanders of the Marshall Islands (Kwajalein) operation, who had since taken a command role in

OVERLORD, attempted to share the lessons of amphibious operations in the Pacific including the benefits of massed and sustained naval gunfire and the use of amphibious tractors. His OVERLORD superiors treated his sound advice with contempt.157 Hall also pushed for more naval gunfire forces, but only received part of what he requested and had to content himself with what he considered “inadequate” naval gunfire support.158 During the Marshall Islands landings American amphibious troops enjoyed the support of as many as seven battleships, three heavy cruisers and eighteen destroyers, and many of the battleships were new-generation vessels with 16” guns. At OMAHA, however, there were no heavy cruisers, only 12 destroyers and only two battleships – one with 12” guns and one with 14” guns – and these were essentially the two oldest battleships in the fleet with guns incapable of high-angle fire.159

Adm. Bertram Ramsay of the British Royal Navy War, the overall OVERLORD naval commander (and, coincidentally, also the naval officer designated to command the SLEDGEHAMMER naval forces), maintained even before D-Day that naval bombardment would only work against shore batteries in open emplacements and was ineffective against batteries protected by massive concrete shelters.160 By 1944 nearly all major German coastal batteries were encased in steel-reinforced concrete, whereas in 1942 most all of them, including those protecting the eastern shore of the Cotentin Peninsula were positioned

Interestingly enough, the Dieppe planners, as we have already seen, had requested the use of a battleship to provide additional firepower to support their landing (though their request was denied for reasons that were more political than military). The 4” guns that the small destroyers that accompanied the task force were not powerful enough to silence German positions dug into the chalk cliffs at Dieppe.

Dieppe ought to have demonstrated the need for substantial support from big naval guns.161 Results from the TORCH landings and at Sicily and Salerno (where British forces benefited from a pre-landing bombardment that the Americans had eschewed to their later regret) had shown the usefulness of naval gunfire.162 Nevertheless, the OMAHA and UTAH naval bombardment groups were not only far weaker and fired for far shorter durations than those typical for Pacific island invasions, they were even weaker in firepower than the naval warships the Americans committed to TORCH. Nevertheless, we are supposed to believe that Dieppe taught the Allies a lesson about the importance of overwhelming firepower when making an amphibious assault on a well-defended beachhead. The reality of D-Day tells a different story, however. The troops landing on D-Day were denied the benefit of adequate naval

163 bombardment because the OVERLORD planners had not heeded the lessons of earlier operations.

The American soldiers who alighted from their landing craft onto UTAH or OMAHA had to do so while burdened with a surplus of gear and equipment. This was not the first time American soldiers were forced to labor under such a handicap, however. Multiple amphibious operations and exercises had clearly demonstrated the often fatal consequences of overloading infantrymen in the assault phase of amphibious landings. In North Africa, the Mediterranean and in the Pacific, American troops had landed with too heavy of a load.164 Even so, the men hitting the Normandy beaches on D-Day were once again loaded down by excessive “essential” gear. In this respect the Americans had not advanced

68 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra at all since TORCH. As in previous landings, the consequences were sometimes fatal as a number of overburdened American soldiers landing on D-Day drowned under the weight of their equipment and undoubtedly some were hit by German fire they might otherwise have avoided had they been more mobile. Once again, the Americans had failed to take advantage of the lessons they might have drawn from previous experience.

The example of UTAH also undermines the argument for the necessity of lengthy and elaborate preparations. UTAH was a late addition to the overall OVERLORD plan and consequently the troops had less time to plan and train. Yet it was arguably the easiest of all the D-Day landings and was certainly more successful than the near debacle at OMAHA.

The OVERLORD planners demonstrated in numerous ways that they had failed to learn the lessons of the past. Far from benefiting from previous experience, they essentially created their own doctrinal universe. Convinced that an amphibious operation across the English Channel was unique, they failed to leverage the lessons of previous amphibious operations. As one historian described it, the OVERLORD planners sought “new solutions to problems that had previously been identified and studied, problems for which there were established procedures, techniques, and materials…. In doing so, they discarded many lessons of the past.”165

SLEDGEHAMMER skeptics, however, have often emphasized another distinct aspect of “required” preparation: training. It is almost surprising to find a historical treatment of Kasserine Pass – or Dieppe, for that matter – that does not feature the obligatory coda summarizing the future benefits the Allies would accrue from these defeats, particularly as it relates to subsequent improvements in training. Other authors, without making reference to Kasserine or Dieppe, have made the point that the Americans especially needed a great deal of seasoning before they would be ready to fight the Germans across the

English Channel. Since it is in accord with our common-sense notions about progress and learning

69 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra from experience, it seems obvious that something of the sort must have taken place. It is also at least a possibility that even if the problems Allied forces manifested in North Africa were, as I have already argued, primarily the result of a defective Allied strategy, the Allies may still have learned important lessons there without which future success would not have been possible.

While it is true that veterans of the fighting in North Africa and the Mediterranean generally displayed superior abilities in combat during the campaign following D-Day, there is little evidence that the inexperienced units which took part in that campaign – and, of the 22 American divisions of all types that saw action in France through the middle of August, only four had previously seen action against the enemy – were substantially better prepared for battle than their inexperienced forerunners had been in

North Africa and in the Mediterranean. 166

The performance of American forces on D-Day fails to show a dramatic transformation in performance that many authors have espoused. The first Americans to arrive on the Cotentin Peninsula were paratroops of the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions. Part of the 82nd had already seen action in airborne operations in the Mediterranean. Experience there clearly demonstrated the difficulty involved in dropping troops on their intended landing zones at night. American glider crews, despite the many months available for preparation, had barely trained for nighttime landings. American night drops on D-

Day were no different than those in the Mediterranean in terms of accuracy. Isolated sticks of paratroops landed all over the peninsula, few in the correct area and many miles away from where they ought to have been with the consequent result of disorganization and confusion.167

The amphibious landings that followed the initial paratroop drops exhibited similar navigation problems. Almost every group of American landing craft touched down on the wrong beach. At

OMAHA, six out of the eight companies came ashore at the wrong place, while at UTAH the entire landing went over a mile off course.168 The result again was confusion and disorganization – a “ghastly

OVERLORD represented a vast improvement over the performance of JUBILEE – where amphibious technique, some authors would have us believe, was “deficient” – the timing and accuracy of the cross-

Channel landing of August 1942 (almost certainly the same British crews who would have transported the initial waves ashore for SLEDGEHAMMER) were actually far superior, even though they were required to land without the benefit of daylight.170 It is interesting to note that at least one of the two

American companies that landed on its proper beach on 6 June 1944 was transported in landing craft crewed by British sailors. While the weaker defense at the place where the Americans actually landed at

UTAH may have meant that landing off course had been fortuitous, it hardly represents a demonstration of improved training or preparation.

If we look at the scene on OMAHA in the first phase of the landings there, what we see is far from what one might expect from a force that has supposedly been magnificently trained and prepared. As the American naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison describes it:

All along Omaha there was a disunited, confused and partly leaderless body of infantry, without cohesion, with no artillery support, huddled under the seawall to get shelter from withering fire.171

For a time it appeared as if this seemingly inert mass of men were doomed to a defeat every bit as complete as at Dieppe. The Germans had designed a system of interlocking machine gun fire that subjected any movement on the beach to the fire of multiple machine guns.172 The direct fire of antitank guns hit and knocked out most of the tanks and vehicles at the shoreline. Most of the special engineering teams, subject to the murderous machine gun fire from the surrounding bluffs and the general muddle caused by their own off-course landing, were unable to clear gaps in the beach obstacles before they were submerged by the rapidly rising tide, and OMAHA soon became choked with the detritus of war.

71 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra Groups of brave men, however, began to take action. Little by little they fought their way off the beach and up the bluffs.173 This was a testament more to the character of the men than the quality of their preparation, however. Here at least one might argue that training, while perhaps not preparing troops specifically for the challenges that faced them at OMAHA, had helped mold the troops more generally into soldiers who cope with the stress of battle. The ability to prevail at OMAHA more likely had been due to the innate characteristics of the leaders who rallied the men there, however.

Were the men at Dieppe, then, deficient in the personal attributes that brought victory at OMAHA?

More likely, it was the parameters of the operational plan, informed by the underlying strategy, which left the Canadian troops no chance to demonstrate the measure of their own valor and initiative. When things began to go wrong at OMAHA, Col. George Taylor could honestly tell his men “If you stay on the beach you’re dead or about to die!” In that situation accomplishing the mission and saving one’s own life went hand in hand. At Dieppe, however, the situation was completely different. The end point of that mission was not to be in a foxhole somewhere inland from the beach, but to be on a troop transport returning to England. When one group of soldiers braved machinegun fire to break into the town of

Dieppe no one followed them.174 But why would they? A soldier would have to run a deadly gauntlet not just once but twice if he was to return to the beaches from which he might re-embark for home.

Pushing further inland under such circumstances only meant a greater likelihood of becoming a casualty, a risk a man would ordinarily accept only if there were some discernable good reason for it. The men at

OMAHA certainly could imagine they would be saving their own life and perhaps the lives of their fellow soldiers by advancing against the enemy, but at Dieppe the maximum reward for such action would be nothing more tangible than being able to say that you had made it x number of yards further inland. Here again we can see how a flawed underlying strategy can negatively affect the combat effectiveness of troops.

“amphibious.” Of course, while amphibious training might allow a force landed on a beachhead to more quickly and effective reorganize in their constituent units, the poor navigation and intense German fire effectively negated that possibility at OMAHA. Though these problems made it more difficult for men who had trained together to actually fight together, from almost the first moment they came ashore their action became essentially a standard infantry assault. With this obvious fact in mind, it would seem that preparation for D-Day ought to have involved more training in basic infantry tactics and techniques and less in practicing running off of landing craft.

At least some American units, however, seemed poorly prepared in even basic infantry assault tactics. If any unit had had ample opportunity to absorb the lessons of Dieppe and Kasserine and otherwise prepare for D-Day, it was the 29th Infantry Division, which had arrived in Britain in early

th October 1942. On D-Day, Members of the 29 had to endure the bloodbath on OMAHA, but a number of them rallied and fought their way off the beaches. Nevertheless, Gen. Norman Cota, the assistant commander of the 29th I.D., was soon confronted with the fact that some of his men at least did not know how to perform a task as elementary as assaulting an occupied dwelling. Despite his high rank, he actually demonstrated to an unbelieving junior officer how it should be done by leading a group of his men in an assault against a house full of German soldiers. While this incident says something about the character of Gen. Cota it suggests even more about the deficiency in the standard of training that

Americans soldiers who were sent into Normandy received.175

The very selection of divisions that were to make the initial assault also reflects poorly on the judgment of the upper echelon leaders who had putatively “matured” thanks to their experiences in the

Mediterranean.176 It is almost beyond comprehension that the veteran U.S. 9th Infantry Division was not among the three spearhead divisions on D-Day. Even more incomprehensible was that the woefully

73 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra unprepared 90th Infantry Division went into combat as one of the first follow-on American divisions after D-Day, again, before the 9th I.D. When the 9th I.D. did finally enter the fight on the Cotentin

Peninsula they showed just how much experience counted, as the men of the 9th drove across the width of the peninsula and then on to Cherbourg with a dispatch that its predecessor divisions had proven unable to attain. The 9th, however, was more of an exception. The 9th, along with the 1st Infantry

Division that came ashore on D-Day on OMAHA, were the only two standard American infantry divisions that participated in the fighting in Normandy through the end of June that had actually fought

177 the Germans prior to its participation in OVERLORD.

The story of the green American divisions were, not surprisingly, quite different than that of the veteran 9th. From the moment the inexperienced American divisions entered battle they displayed virtually all of the faults that some authors would have us believe were cured by the experiences of

Kasserine. As some of the better of studies of American combat performance in Normandy have shown, most American troops entered Normandy lacking even proficiency in basic combined-arms tactics. The

Americans’ “most serious training deficiency” was in “[e]ffective cooperation between the combat arms” and were “[d]eprived of combined arms training prior to D-Day”178 The experience in Tunisia regarding “tank-infantry coordination was lost on the army as a whole. Not until several weeks into the

Normandy campaign would the army put much-needed emphasis on infantry-tank training in combined- arms attacks.”179 Troops often had difficulty in advancing against the enemy in large part because

American attacks were typically blundering, front-on affairs.180 This was true even of units, like the 8th

Infantry Division, that were reputed to have been among the best-trained formations in the American

Army.181 Many of these units suffered far higher casualty rates in Normandy in a few weeks than their counterparts had in Tunisia over a period of months.

74 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra Nor was American performance much better with respect to air-ground cooperation. Bradley concluded that his troops “went into France almost totally untrained in air-ground cooperation.”182 One major study of American combat performance concluded that “[o]perations just after D-Day reflected the lack of training and the persistent doctrinal and technical problems with air support.”183 Yet another study concludes that “[n]ot until the breakout from Normandy in late July 1944 did the close air support system become responsive to the needs of the ground forces.”184

Part of the problem was the OVERLORD planners’ myopia with respect to the problem of making it off the beaches. As one historian has put it “virtually all Allied planning for the cross-Channel invasion concentrated on the immediate problem of getting and staying ashore, to the neglect of subsequent movements.”185 American Gen. Ray Barker had actually made that point, to little effect at the Rattle

Conference.186 While this sort of tunnel-vision arguably may have led to a training regime that helped

American troops fight their way off OMAHA, it did nothing to prepare men for the type of combat they would experience directly after moving inland from the beaches. Only a few hours after landing on

OMAHA, and much more quickly on UTAH, American troops found themselves fighting in terrain for which they had received no preparation whatsoever. On the one hand, one has to wonder what the experience on previous Mediterranean battlefields, where terrain had been completely different, could have taught the men fighting in the hedgerows of Normandy. More fundamentally, however, it strains credulity to believe that the training the Allied ground troops received before D-Day made an important difference in preparing them for fighting in the hedgerows of Normandy since nothing was done to gear their the training for combat in such terrain.

It is hard to square the story of the 90th Infantry Division in northern Europe with the “better prepared through improved training” paradigm. Few if any of the units that saw their first combat in

Normandy made less auspicious debuts than did the 90th. Not only did it fail on numerous occasions to

Bradley seriously considered disbanding it and using the leftover troops as replacements for other units.

He never actually went that far, but he did replace the 90th’s commanding general. Before long, the

90th’s performance began to improve. As one veteran of that unit, W.E. DePuy, who later rose to high rank in the U.S. Army, recalled later on, “It is hard to overstate how ineffective that division was at the beginning, and how very effective it was at the end.”187 At some point, a remarkable transformation took place and by late 1944 Eisenhower named the 90th as one of the best divisions in his command.

Was this the result of the “improved training” finally kicking in? It is highly unlikely. The 90th sustained over 100% casualties before it made its turnaround. The replacement troops had not only not trained with the rest of the division in the “indispensable” preparatory period prior to D-Day, they were trained to a lower standard to begin with. Part of the explanation can be found in yet another quote from

DePuy: “we trained a lot of lieutenants just to the point where it isn't a national disgrace to put them on the battlefield. I was one of them, I know that, and we kind of went to war and let survival of the fittest

[prevail]”188

Whether or not the transformation of the American Army in Normandy was principally the result of a cruelly efficient Darwinian process, the rebirth of the 90th I.D. was hardly unique. The same story repeated itself over and over again during the campaign as American soldiers learned and improved in the merciless training ground of combat. As some of the more perceptive studies of American combat soldiers in World War II have noted, this process was not exclusive to Normandy and it was not one that came from the top down. As was the case in earlier campaigns, American troops learned from their combat experience. Nevertheless, as one commentator noted, the “fact that one division participated in combat and managed to learn its lessons did not mean such experience was automatically imparted to other American divisions.”189 When one author concludes that in Normandy the “lessons of Kasserine

76 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra Pass…had to be re-learned at a frightful cost”190 isn’t that tantamount to admitting that the U.S. Army as an institution never learned those lessons to begin with? Each division had to go through the same process of improvement on the battlefields of the Mediterranean and on the continent of Europe. While there is a great deal of evidence that American combat formations improved after they saw combat, there is little evidence that they improved significantly due to the combat experience of other units.

In the context of a comparison of OVERLORD with SLEDGEHAMMER one has to consider that even at its worst, the 90th I.D. did not dissolve into a desperate mob, running panic-stricken into the sea as some of the more extreme Sledgehammer skeptics would seemingly have us believe.191 Though they proved themselves at first to be unequal to the task of offensive action under the demanding conditions imposed on the attacking soldier in the bocage, they were perfectly able to hold their ground without major loss of territory, all that would have been demanded of most of the Allied units in the fall of 1942, once the neck of the Cotentin Peninsula had been secured. If we are to accept DePuy’s assessment that the

“training never did improve, but as the war went on a few survivors accumulated some seasoning through luck and natural cunning,” 192 then there is every reason to believe that not only was a substantial improvement in the training of American soldiers not necessary for the success of a cross-

Channel operation, but also that other American fighting units could have made similar progress in the context of an earlier invasion.

Apparently, the British training system was also not free from problems. As one study of infantry states, some of the training practices of the British during World War II “bordered on the juvenile …[or] ridiculous.” The real problem was that in emphasizing battle drills, British training methods tended to encourage their troop not to think about what they were doing. It went hand in hand with the British tendency to issue orders “down to the last detail” that smothered individual initiative.193 Since this was

There was one area in which the Americans showed proficiency from the beginning of the

Normandy campaign: artillery. “From the time American divisions first entered the Second World War against Germany in 1942, the same Germans who disparaged American infantry consistently praise

American artillery.”194 In this connection it is interesting to note Rommel’s appraisal of the Americans in one of the engagements that made up the Battle of Kasserine Pass:

After allowing the attacking column to move peacefully on up the valley, they had suddenly poured fire on it from three sides, quickly bringing it to a halt. [Our] men had been astounded at the flexibility and accuracy of the American artillery, which had put a great number of our tanks out of action. When they were later forced to withdraw, the American infantry followed up closely and turned the withdrawal into a costly retreat.195

Gen. Terry Allen, who commanded the American 1st Infantry Division in North Africa, recalled that

“[d]uring the Tunisian campaign…field artillery units of the First Infantry Division killed more

Germans in repelling enemy counter-attacks than in all other types of fires combined.”196 Assessing

American success in the war in Europe, General George S. Patton, Jr. said, “I do not have to tell you who won the war. You know our artillery did.”197 DePuy held similar views: “I really believe, based on my experience, that the combat power provided by the artillery…probably represented 90% or more of the combat power actually applied against the enemy.”198 There is little question that the excellence of

American artillery was developed not only before Kasserine, but even before American involvement in the war itself.199

It is important to point out in the context of the type of campaign that was likely to develop in the wake of a successful SLEDGEHAMMER landing that, as the Rommel and Allen quotes above suggest, artillery was perhaps the best defensive weapon of World War II. While the effects of artillery are often limited in the offensive role, when the enemy can be expected to be well dug-in, in the defensive role the

78 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra enemy necessarily must expose himself more often to the defenders’ fire. The British Army as well had re-learned the virtues of massed artillery fire in battle at least by the time of the First Battle of El

Alamein in July.200

It is time to consider a different paradigm for the development of Allied fighting power during

World War Two. For the Americans at least it was not a story of progress at the institutional level. A succession of inexperienced divisions had to go through essentially the same learning curve once they entered battle for the first time. The process of learning and improving that undoubtedly took place did so principally at the division level and below. The American troops that saw first combat in Normandy, that is, most of the American troops that fought there, manifested essentially the same strengths and weaknesses as their predecessors did in North Africa. The performance of British ground troops, according to some authors, does not seem to have shown the same dramatic progress (though this is beyond the scope of this study). If this is true, it only reinforces the argument for the more important role that strategy played. Even with barely mediocre performance of ground troops, British as well as

American prevailed over their German enemies. For both Americans and British it was a story of better strategy bringing about better combat results.

The DD tank in a way serves as a symbol for all that was wrong about the preparations for D-Day as well as the “lessons learned” narrative. The need for such a craft was dubious to begin with. The Allies had developed and utilized LCT’s precisely to fill the requirement of getting tanks ashore during an amphibious landing. The LCT had proven its usefulness as far back as Dieppe, and it continued to show its value in subsequent operations (though the Allies had to leave almost all of their fleet of LCT’s in

British home waters during TORCH because, while they could navigate the English Channel, they normally would not operate in the open ocean). Supposedly, the DD tank was to provide a measure of shock value that a tank landing by means of an LCT could not achieve. The thinking was that since they

79 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra would ride low in the water (the same characteristic that made them exceptionally prone to swamping), the troops ashore would not notice them until they suddenly emerged from the water and onto beaches they were defending. No one ever seemed to wonder how this would have a greater psychological effect on the defending troops than seeing a number of large landing craft land nearby and disgorge in short order six or eight tanks a piece. Indeed, it was LCT’s that brought the DD tanks to the shores of

Normandy to begin with and it was principally those LCT’s that did not discharge their DD tanks into the rough swell and simply brought them ashore in conventional fashion that actually successfully completed their mission of getting tanks ashore. At that point the special swimming gear that still encumbered the DD tanks that rumbled down the ramps of the LCT’s represented nothing more than wasted time and effort.

Certainly, no one would suggest that a requirement for such a tank like the DD emerged from the experiences of Kasserine Pass. We have heard from historians time and again, however, about how the

Americans in particular learned from the rough treatment they received there. One of the lessons they are supposed to have learned at Kasserine was that they needed better equipment. When American troops arrived on the shores of Normandy, however, they had essentially the very same equipment (with the exception of the M3 Grant tank, which was already in the process of being replaced by the M4

Sherman at the time of the TORCH landings) that had been “deficient” at Kasserine. At Kasserine the

Americans encountered the huge German Tiger tanks with their thick armor and powerful 88mm guns.

The latest American Sherman tank was no match in firepower or protection for the Tiger. The German

Mk IV tanks, which the Americans also had first encountered in November of 1942, also outgunned any

American tank by a wide margin. If the Americans had truly learned their lessons from the fighting in

Tunisia they would have at least attempted to develop and deploy a new tank that could fight on equal terms with the latest German tanks, or they could have, at minimum, tried to mount a bigger gun on their

80 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra standard Sherman. Instead, when American troops came ashore on 6 June 1944, they were supported by essentially the same Shermans that they had employed in Tunisia. What the troops landing and fighting in Normandy really needed was not an unseaworthy swimming tank, but a better tank with a bigger gun.

The SLEDGEHAMMER planners would seemingly have had a more daunting task than that of the

OVERLORD planners. Since neither the British nor the Americans had as yet mounted a large amphibious operation, nearly everything the SLEDGEHAMMER planners would call for would represent an innovation. Without long lead times, however, they chose to keep things relatively simple and future operations would demonstrate that the solutions they devised to the challenges they faced were quite workable.

All of the elaborate planning and preparations and special equipment did not prevent a near fiasco at

OMAHA. That the Americans prevailed there on D-Day is almost solely due to the efforts of the men who landed there. What they found was nothing like what their top leaders had led them to expect. The air and naval bombardments had done limited damage and the defenses there were nearly intact. Few supporting tanks had made it ashore and most of those fell victim to German anti-tank guns. The obstacle clearing groups had been unable to clear most of the gaps called for in the plan, making it difficult for follow-on forces to land. Essentially the men there were reduced to their personal weapons with a little assistance from a few humble destroyers off shore. Once off the beaches they had to meet the challenge of fighting an offensive campaign in the formidable terrain of the hedgerows. They had to manufacture victory on their own and on the spot, and they did.

**********

One strategic dimension of the war, the war in the air, did shift significantly in the Allies’ favor by

1944. In terms of both overall numbers of aircraft and of the ratio of friendly to enemy warplanes, they enjoyed a margin of superiority in the air they could never have attained in 1942. Some

81 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra SLEDGEHAMMER skeptics have seized upon this fact and presented it as another piece of damning evidence pointing towards the failure of any attempt at an early Second Front. The “Allies had not yet won the air war” argument seems plausible at first.201 Allied air supremacy did play a large and vital role in helping them prevail in Normandy and the campaigns that followed. The problem with this objection is that it does not take into account the changes in the overall strategic picture between 1942 and 1944. The real question with respect to the air power issue does not involve a comparison of absolute or even relative strengths of the air forces of the Anglo-Americans and their Germany opponents, but whether the Western Powers had adequate air power to prevail in the context of 1942. If one considers that one of the principal contributions air power made to Allied victory in 1944 was the interdiction and destruction of enemy weapons and other resources, it becomes clear that such contributions were not nearly so important in 1942 than in 1944 in light of the general dilution of

German power and the far weaker military posture it maintained in the west. The Allies would not have needed the same level of “tank-busting” capability from their air forces since by arriving in 1942 they would have already “eliminated” more than 80% of German tanks that they would find there in 1944. In effect, the Allies could have achieved something of the same benefit as they did through the application of air power far more easily merely by arriving on the battlefield before Germany had produced its additional armaments and supplies, mobilized its additional manpower resources, and committed them to the West.

It is also important to examine the air power question in terms of the more modest operational objectives of SLEDGEHAMMER. The immediate objectives of Operation SLEDGEHAMMER involved only the seizure of enough of the Cotentin Peninsula sufficient to enable the Allies to utilize its main port and to operate supporting air bases. Unlike OVERLORD,SLEDGEHAMMER did not require an early breakout into the interior of France. The ground fighting for the foreseeable period beyond the establishment of a

The implicit analogy behind the “air war not yet won” argument is the wrong one. An examination of the air wars in the Tunisia and the Mediterranean reveal closer parallels than one that uses

OVERLORD as a standard. It is clear that the relative air power in Tunisia, for the first few months at least, tilted in favor of the Germans. With their bombers flying out of long-established air facilities in

Sicily, they needed to base only their short-range fighters in Tunisia itself where their possession of hard-surfaced runways located closer to the front gave them significant advantages over the Allies.202

Bradley reported poor air support not only in Tunisia (“the Luftwaffe pasted our men”), and beyond

(“air support on Sicily was scandalously, casual, careless and ineffective.”).203 Even British Air

Marshall Arthur Tedder, normally an apologist for Allied air power admitted that in Tunisia the

Germans were able to “strafe [our] airfields, causing heavy losses on the ground [and that f]requent bombing raids were likewise directed against the ports on which we depended.”204 Nevertheless, the

Germans were unable to leverage their superiority in the air to anything more than temporary advantage.

As embarrassing as the local and temporary setbacks at Kasserine may have been for the Allies in general and the Americans in particular, the Germans were otherwise unable to significantly push back the Allies in Tunisia.

As we have already seen, it was not for lack of material resources that the Allies had been unable to win the air war in Tunisia. In 1943 they were entering their fourth year in which they would outproduce the Germans in aircraft by a large margin. Unlike the Germans, the British and Americans had not been engaged in lengthy, intensive, and debilitating air operations with the larger part of the air forces. It was only the severe logistical constraints imposed on the Allies by their decision to undertake a campaign in

North Africa that kept them from taking advantage of their already immense numerical superiority.

Allies to gain air superiority over the Germans, a superiority that they held onto in that theater for the balance of the war. Nevertheless, it is important to point out that though the extent of Anglo-American air power in 1943 did not approach that which it enjoyed in northwest Europe in 1944 (either in a relative or absolute sense), it was still sufficient to successfully support two major amphibious landings: at Sicily in July and at Salerno in September.

Another implicit premise of the “air war not yet won” objection is that the German air force in the fall of 1942 still had the power to contest for air superiority in the West. Contemporaneous German documents testify that they themselves held the opposite conviction. The minutes of an upper-level staff meeting in March states that the Luftwaffe has neither a sufficient number of bombers nor fighters to mount a lasting defense against a major Allied landing in the West.205 The very first substantive sentence in Rundstedt’s standing orders for his troops in the West and in effect in the fall of 1942 declares emphatically that in the event of an amphibious invasion “the enemy will win mastery of the air.”206 Hitler himself, in a meeting with a number of high officers in mid-August that focused on the subject of a possible Allied landing on the continent, had to admit to the “complete air inferiority” of the

Luftwaffe in northwest Europe.207 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill publicly boasted in a BBC radio broadcast that spring of the “growing” superiority the RAF. Indeed, one of the main justifications for SLEDGEHAMMER to begin with was to translate the Allies’ already substantial numerical superiority into strategically significant action.

Contrary to the idea one might form by reading the misinformed representations of the

Sledgehammer skeptics, by the beginning of 1942 the largest concentration of air power anywhere in the world, by far, was in southern England. The SLEDGEHAMMER planners estimated on the basis of very accurate intelligence, that the Allies would enjoy a better than 7 to 1 advantage in fighter aircraft at the

84 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra beginning of the operation. Even this estimate, however, assumes a very low number of American fighters will be available and also overstates slightly the size of the German fighter force in the West.

By the end of September there were only 1,491 single engine fighters in the entire Luftwaffe (of which, but 1,024 were operational) while the RAF could propose building up a reserve force of 1,436 fighters for SLEDGEHAMMER, over and above the number of fighters already in operational squadrons – a dramatic illustration of the relative balance of air power that existed at the time (the global reserves for

German fighters, as with almost every other category of aircraft, for the entire time in question were consistently zero).208 Moreover, the Anglo-Americans were producing fighters at the rate of more than

1,500 a month. The Germans were producing fighters at little more than one-quarter that rate. The actual German production number is irrelevant, however, because, as we have already noted, even at very low pilot loss rates, they could not train replacements fast enough to maintain their already small number of fighter pilots.209 The Anglo-Americans, on the other hand, had the opposite problem.

Though at the beginning of 1942 the Americans were aiming at producing 50,000 airplanes in the current year (a goal they eventually fell just short of attaining), by spring it was becoming clear that they were going to have more pilots than planes.210 While German fighter pilot schools in September could count less than 350 pupils in their ranks (less than a quarter of which were in an advanced state of training), the British alone had five times that number of pilots training for Fighter Command. The

British trainee figure, however, was actually down by more than 50% since July, undoubtedly because at

6,778 officers and trained airmen in the flying cohort of Fighter Command, they were well over 2,000 above the established compliment. For comparative purposes it should be noted that at the same time the Luftwaffe – which had to commit a large percentage of its airpower on the Eastern Front no matter what the circumstances were elsewhere – had just 1,168 fighter pilots fully ready for duty, with another

360 fit for only limited service.211

Western Allies were wasting their air resources on fighting battles that they could not win, i.e., the bombing campaign against German population centers, and the counterproductive fighter sweeps over

212 France. The SLEDGEHAMMER plan, however, called for the retargeting of Allied heavy and medium bombers to the airfields and transportation bottlenecks in France, and fighters striking at trains and troops in transit, covering the landing forces and flying protection on bombing missions. The launching of SLEDGEHAMMER would, therefore, at a stroke convert these wasted assets into ones actually making substantial contributions to the overall war. Moreover, Allied pilots and ground crews would not have to attempt to fly and maintain their aircraft under primitive conditions at the end of a long and tenuous supply chain, as often was the case in the Mediterranean. Instead, they would have the benefit of the most elaborate and modern system of airfields, all of which were within easy flying distance of the numerous facilities that a major industrial power such as Britain could provide. In addition, since Allied air power would be operating from a “pivot” position – where it could strike at targets in France on one day and strike at targets in Germany the next – it would force the Germans into the Hobson’s choice of dividing their air power or leaving one of these areas with little or no fighter defense. The war in the

Mediterranean that really did develop did not permit the Germans the same level of flexibility as the

Allies could have exercised from Britain in connection with a cross-Channel operation, but they could re-deploy their air assets between the various parts of Europe and the Mediterranean (which they regularly did) far more easily than the Allies could. From the perspective of the opportunity

SLEDGEHAMMER offered to enable the Allies to put their already considerable air assets to effective and full use, the attempt to conduct an effective air campaign against the Germans starting in North Africa and extending into the Mediterranean, where logistical limitations, the dearth of existing facilities and airbases meant that the Western Allies could only employ a small fraction of their air assets, seems little

86 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra short of insane. The numerical superiority in terms of number of available planes and pilots as well as monthly aircraft production meant that any air war over northwest Europe could result only in Allied victory to one degree or another. Once again, it was faulty strategy that kept the Western Allies from fully leveraging their already considerable resources. As one Luftwaffe expert has concluded, in 1942

“the Germans escaped the full consequences of their difficulties because the Anglo-American air forces found it difficult to come to grips with the Luftwaffe except in peripheral theaters.”213

SLEDGEHAMMER, therefore, far from requiring the winning of the air war as a prerequisite, would rather provide an excellent opportunity for the realization of such a victory.

The same is true with respect to the putatively “yet to be won” submarine war.214 By one important measure – the total of new cargo ship construction compared to the total of ship losses – the Allies had already turned a corner in August of 1942, when, for the first time in the war, the Allies produced more cargo ship tonnage than the Germans were able to sink.215 Now that the Americans had at last driven the

U-Boat away from their coastal waters, and the various crises in other parts of the world subsided, the amount of American Army cargo shipped to Europe surged to almost 800,000 measurement tons, double the amount of the previous month and more than triple the amount of June.216 Unfortunately, just as the

“bridge of ships” that American President Franklin Roosevelt had envisioned would span the Atlantic began to become something of a reality, the change in Allied strategy intervened. The shift from a cross-Channel strategy to one involving an invasion of North Africa plunged the American shipping effort into utter chaos. Not only were shipping schedules, which had to be coordinated with convoy schedules, seriously disrupted, but warehouses that were full of supplies and equipment for the buildup in Britain in anticipation of a cross-Channel invasion now had to be cleared to make space for the logistical requirements of the new operation. In order to quickly clear space, ships were sent out partially loaded, often with cargoes destined for Britain with the very same items that were later required

Africa – a further waste of scarce shipping capacity. Some of the cargo ended up simply lost and some other items had to be shipped two and even three times.217 Overall shipments from U.S. ports to

Atlantic destinations fell by some 60% and this decrease does not even take into account the negative impact of lost, sidelined, and duplicated shipments. For months, shipments from the U.S. remained well below the August numbers, which was not surpassed until the following March. Churchill, who pushed for an unrealistically early date for the North African expedition, held back large quantities of shipping in British ports, sidelining yet more shipping capacity.218

In order to build up further resources for TORCH, the Allies curtailed aid shipments to the Soviet

Union. The 129,000 tons of cargo originally intended for the Soviets via Murmansk instead swung at anchor in Scottish ports for months, representing what the official history terms “perhaps the most flagrant waste of cargo during 1942.”219 Worse yet, among the sidelined shipments were a significant number of fighter planes that the Soviets desperately needed. Their retention in the U.K. caused something of a diplomatic contretemps that only added to Soviet anger over the cancellation of

SLEDGEHAMMER. The Americans explained to the Soviets that these planes were needed for TORCH, but they came into action against the common enemy long after they would have if SLEDGEHAMMER had gone forward. The need to divert resources for TORCH was, despite what many history books relate, as much responsible for the suspension of aid shipment to the Soviets via the preferred northern route as was the putative risk of sailing merchant ships along that route. The Americans were reduced to sending an average of but twelve of its own ships per month in Lend-Lease assistance to the Soviet Union, but the inadequate facilities at the sole remaining destination port area for Soviet aid in the Persian Gulf could not accommodate even this small amount and a backlog of unloaded ships persisted there for months.220 As the battle at Stalingrad reached its climax, America’s ambassador to Moscow noted with

Roosevelt had chided Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov that “he could not have his cake and eat it too” when the minister had failed to give a satisfactory answer to the question of whether the Soviet government would accept less aid in return for the opening of a Second Front.222 Although Molotov eventually agreed to consider such a reduction in aid in return for SLEDGEHAMMER, in the end the

Soviets got reduced aid and no Second Front.223

The change in strategy had another effect in the Battle of the Atlantic. Though by August the crisis

German U-Boats plying American coastal waters had caused had finally passed, sinkings elsewhere continued at a reduced but still troubling rate. Nevertheless, during the last four months of 1942, a ship making a transatlantic passage in convoy had less than a 3% chance of being sunk by enemy U-Boats.224

The change in Allied strategy from one focused on the North Atlantic to one focused on the

Mediterranean, however, made it more difficult for the Allies to use the proven convoy method. Since each of the three widely separated landing task forces involved in TORCH had to have protection against submarines, each one received a generous allocation of destroyers, most of them large, ocean-going types, which otherwise might have participated in transatlantic convoys.225 Furthermore, by opening up a new and distinct line of line of communication in the Atlantic, Operation TORCH also ensured that the dilution of the already strained existing convoy escort fleet would continue for months. Due to the lack of escorts, Allied merchant ships often had to sail outside of the protection of convoys, with predictable results. Two-dozen British freighters, for example, that had to sail in the Central Atlantic singly and without escort in a five-week period during the fall of 1942 fell victim to German torpedoes. The loss rate for ships forced by the TORCH diversions to sail without escort was triple that of ships sailing in

226 protected convoys. It was no coincidence that in November, the first month of the TORCH, shipping losses to the U-Boats spiked, marking the last month of the war in which losses of cargo vessels would

89 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra exceed construction.227 The Allies also found it necessary to divert a large number of antisubmarine aircraft, including Very Long Range bombers to support the war in North Africa. As in the case of the air war, the implementation of SLEDGEHAMMER would have significantly enhanced the Allied war on the U-Boat, since by concentrating on a one main line of communications the Allies would have been better able to better protect their merchant ships and the vital cargoes they carried.

The Allies suffered the negative logistical effects of the decision to reject SLEDGEHAMMER in favor of TORCH in other ways as well. Though one of the main rationales for the campaigns in North Africa and the Mediterranean was to reopen and secure Allied shipping lanes through the Mediterranean, those campaigns actually consumed more shipping than they saved. Against a predicted savings of 225 ships over a five-month period once the Mediterranean route was re-opened, the TORCH plan itself envisioned a the “continuous” employment of 218 American and 160 British merchant vessels.228 British commitments to TORCH also proved a huge strain on their shipping and as a consequence British imports fell by 500,000 tons a month, an almost 30% reduction. Shocked by the dropping stocks of food and raw materials, the British demanded and eventually won higher shipping allocations for their civilian economy. Now, however, the Allies overshot the mark in the other direction – in part because the uncertainty over the timing of a cross-Channel operation drove estimates of needed stockpiles upwards – resulting in the waste of yet more shipping. Continuing operations in the Mediterranean after

TORCH concluded used more shipping than what was saved when the Mediterranean shipping route reopened following the capture of Tunisia.229 It is no wonder that the author of a detailed study of

Allied wartime logistics held that the “decision to invade French North Africa…was logistically catastrophic” and “strategically untenable.” 230

By opting for North Africa, the Americans effectively sidelined a significant part of their shipping capacity, since the lack of convoy escorts and port capacity in North Africa meant that more ships were

90 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra available than could be profitably employed.231 Due primarily to the existing limitations in port capacity, turnaround times for ships originating in the U.S. and bound for the Mediterranean theater were 30% longer than those bound for the United Kingdom.232 The fact that the Americans had already built up several hundred thousand tons of supplies in Britain by September of 1942 and that the British could supply their own troops from factories only hundreds instead of thousands of miles away meant that they could realize logistical efficiencies they could not in North Africa or, for that matter, any other place in the world where they might engage the enemy. The Allies had to set up and maintain in North

Africa large logistical infrastructures, along with the associated personnel, using up scarce shipping capacity to essentially duplicate there what already existed in Britain.

Though the American official history’s claim that “[m]ost of the logistical difficulties of the North

African landings could be traced to…the sudden reversal of the SLEDGEHAMMER-ROUNDUP preparations and the late decision to undertake a venture of altogether different scope” has great merit, the disadvantage of TORCH and other operations in the Mediterranean as compared to one based on a cross-Channel was fundamentally one of geography.233 The shorter lines of communications between a major base and the combat zone that a cross-Channel operation would involve, meant that the Allies could better rationalize the usage of shipping and avoid the problems that showed up both at the beginning of TORCH when American commanders packed in supplies and equipment not needed for the initial invasion, thus hampering supply efforts in the critical first days of the operation, and later on when thousands of vehicles were shipped to North Africa on wheels (rather than boxed), incurring “an extravagant wastage of shipping.”234 Based on the actual shipping performance of the last half of 1942, the Anglo-Americans had the combined capacity to ship across the Atlantic in support of an operation such as SLEDGEHAMMER (that is, over and above other vital civilian and military shipping needs) at least 750,000 long tons of cargo per month – enough to provision a force of 825,000 men.235

91 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra In their logistical preparations for OVERLORD, however, the Allies seem to have erred in the direction of over-preparedness. The fact that the Americans were able to build up in Britain several million tons of supplies in preparation for a cross-Channel attack, as impressive as it was as a demonstration of contemporaneous Allied shipping capabilities, was not necessarily a demonstration of the efficient use of shipping and production resources. By the end of May 1944, the Americans had shipped to Britain some 5.3 million long tons of supplies and equipment as part of its pre-invasion buildup. At first glance, this would seem to represent convincing evidence against the possibility of a successful cross-Channel operation in 1942 since the Americans could not possibly have hoped to achieve such an enormous accumulation of supplies at that early of a date. Quite apart from the fact that this ignores that the smaller scale of SLEDGEHAMMER did not require the same magnitude of logistical effort as OVERLORD, such a viewpoint would beg the question of whether or not such a large reserve was required even for the larger operations envisioned for 1944. Actually, if one projects the 600,000 ton monthly discharge figure the Americans achieved in May of 1944 in British ports over the balance of the year against actual discharges at northern European ports after the invasion, he will find that the

Americans would have only drawn down their reserve in Britain by a little more than 1.3 million tons – less than a quarter of the stockpiles accumulated before D-Day.236 It seems that American logistical preparations where governed less by the principal of “just in time” and more by the less efficient principal of “just in case.”

Another example in which the “just in case” syndrome came into play in a way that was wasteful of

Allied resources was with respect to the construction of the famed Mulberry artificial harbors. Though the Mulberries have been the subject of extensive praise in the World War II literature, the record shows that, however impressive they may have been as feats of British engineering, their actual contribution to the success of OVERLORD was minimal. Through D+5, the Allies had discharged over the beaches

92 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra 326,000 men, 54,000 vehicles and 104,000 tons of stores even though the Mulberries had barely begun to function.237 Before either of the Mulberries could begin full operation, a major Channel storm that began on 19 June destroyed the American Mulberry at OMAHA. Adm. Hall and never been enthusiastic to the idea of the artificial harbor concept to begin with:

I think it is the biggest waste of manpower and equipment that I have ever seen…I can unload a thousand LST’s at a time over the open beaches. Why do you give me something that anybody who’s ever seen the sea act upon 150-ton concrete blocks at Casablanca knows the first storm will destroy? What’s the use of building them just to have them destroyed and litter up the beach?… That’s exactly what happened. The first storm we had, they just messed the whole place up.238

While Hall’s assessment may contain the taint of nationalistic prejudice, the fact remains that despite the destruction of the American Mulberry at Omaha, the beach there discharged men and supplies “far beyond the most optimistic forecasts” which had been made with the expectation that a Mulberry harbor would be operating there.239 On the other hand, by the time the Allies were beginning their breakout from Normandy not a single soldier or vehicle had landed in France via the British Mulberry. Given the magnitude of the Mulberry engineering and construction project, the Allies ended up diverting a large amount of resources on a project that contributed only a modest incremental capability. In one sense, however, the Mulberry concept may have had merit. It did act as an insurance policy against the possibility that major storms might have occurred between the time the Mulberry harbors became fully operational and when the Allies were able to open up conventional port capacity sufficient to supply their forces in Normandy. Since the feared storms came before the Mulberries were fully up and running, and none came afterwards, they took on more of the character of an insurance policy the premiums of which were paid in advance but the benefits of which did not become effective until after the loss it was designed to insure against actually occurred.

Weather, of course, plays a role in most all military operations, and the SLEDGEHAMMER skeptics have often conjured up the specter of bad fall weather in the English Channel as an argument against the

93 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra possible success of SLEDGEHAMMER. This ignores the fact that OVERLORD managed to succeed in the face of bad weather both on D-Day itself and during the storm of June 19-22. Indeed, it was precisely the type of coasters that were the centerpiece of the SLEDGEHAMMER plan, and using exactly the technique envisioned for them in 1942, that came to the rescue when several of these versatile vessels were beached in order to deliver much needed supplies in the wake of the logistical disruptions that the

June storm caused.240 It is also important to remember that significant discharges over the Normandy beaches continued throughout October. It is true that these fell off considerably after the third week of the month, but this was due in part to unusually rainy conditions, and in part to the fact that the roads leading from the beaches, suffering from months of intensive use, were waterlogged, to some extent due to the German inundations that began in late 1943.241 Neither of these aggravating factors would likely have come into play in the context of an October 1942 invasion, however.

The episodic difficulties that bad weather caused in June of 1944 also served to demonstrate the wisdom of the choice of the eastern coast of the Cotentin Peninsula as a landing area. During the fall months winds in the English Channel typically blow from the west, meaning that beaches on the eastern side of the Cotentin Peninsula, as the SLEDGEHAMMER plan states, are “completely sheltered” from the prevailing winds. The plan also states that for the month of October “statistics from 10 years observation [show]…[t]he percentage of days on which a gale force winds from any direction may be expected is 6½ %”.242 That translates to gales force winds on two days in a typical month. The geography of the peninsula, however, would help protect the SLEDGEHAMMER beaches from winds of whatever intensity coming from any direction save NNE to ENE. The shoreline of the Pas de Calais, on the other hand, is completely exposed to westerly winds – and it is the characteristics of this geography in this area that led the SLEDGEHAMMER planners to earlier set a September deadline for launching the operation.243 Even British First Sea Lord Pound, during the final arguments that led to the cancellation

94 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra of SLEDGEHAMMER, acknowledged that the Cotentin Peninsula offered sheltered water whether winds came from the east or west.244 In the former instance he presumably was referring to the underwater ridge to the east of the peninsula, mentioned in the SLEDGEHAMMER plan, that runs parallel to the coastline and offers some protection even from wave actions propagated from winds coming from the otherwise unfavorable east and northeast. When British meteorologist Group Captain John Stagg delivered one of his final forecasts in the run up to OVERLORD, he stated that the same westerly winds that would be at force 4 to 5 off the English coastline would be only force 2 to 3 along the sheltered areas of the French coastline across the Channel.245 Thus, while strong winds in the Channel may have prevented the crossing of the Channel by small landing craft only strong and sustained northeasterly winds, a relatively infrequent phenomenon according to the statistics found in the SLEDGEHAMMER plan, might have hindered the landing of men and supplies over the beaches of the eastern Cotentin

Peninsula. On D-Day, while men and landing craft had to deal with significant swell at OMAHA, sometimes with fatal consequences, the sheltering effects of the Cotentin Peninsula meant that landings

246 at UTAH were made in calm surf conditions. In addition, since beaches with generally the same characteristics ran for many miles along the eastern coast of the peninsula, it was a discharge area with

“virtually no limits.” For OVERLORD, the ample extent of suitable beaches meant that the obstructions the June storm caused were less of a factor on UTAH than on OMAHA. 247 For the SLEDGEHAMMER planners, the greatest significance of almost limitless expandability of these beaches was that the supporting forces could move their unloading area well to the north of Madeleine Beach in case the

Germans moved artillery into the Grandcamp area, but it also meant that there was more than enough suitable beaches to accommodate over the shore discharges.

When the Americans insisted on landing on the Atlantic coast of Morocco during Operations

TORCH, they accepted a high risk with respect to prevailing surf conditions. As Churchill never tired of

95 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra noting, the Americans only had a 20% chance of arriving at a time when surf conditions would make landings there possible.248 The Americans were rewarded for their boldness with exceptionally good surf conditions for the initial landings along the Atlantic coastline of French North Africa. Whatever the theoretical probabilities for acceptable weather conditions in the English Channel in October of 1942, the actual weather that developed during that month proved quite favorable. Both of the favorable periods identified in the SLEDGEHAMMER plan offered periods of weather more than suitable for the initial landing and a following buildup. Altogether, around three-quarters of the days during October found conditions for an amphibious operation that were acceptable or better. Moreover, as the

SLEDGEHAMMER planners noted, an October invasion date offered real advantages to an amphibious operation since the number of hours supporting ships could cross the Channel under cover of darkness rise dramatically during that part of the year compared to the months of summer and late spring. In addition, available weather records point to long periods of solid overcast with a base well above minimums for airborne operations, but too low to allow German dive bombers to attack Allied ships.

The fate of SLEDGEHAMMER in 1942 involved the unfavorable climate of a different variety, however. Advocates for SLEDGEHAMMER had to cope with the gale force winds of opposition originating in the upper echelons of the British political and military establishment. The recollections of a British staff officer who worked on the planning of cross-Channel operations in 1942 and 1943, offers a window into the contemporaneous thinking of his leaders during this period. Looking back on the efforts of the previous months from the standpoint of the spring of 1943, this officer remembered that:

the attitude had to some extent been that the invasion would never take place, that the difficulties were insurmountable, that previous planners had been quite right in forming the most pessimistic opinions of its possible success, and that we should merely produce some plan with so many objections to it that nobody could ever accept it.249

96 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra Something of this attitude seems to have permeated the thinking of much of the top British leadership. They dreamed up every possible objection to SLEDGEHAMMER and relied on the worst possible assumptions when assessing risk. So, even though the SLEDGEHAMMER plan states (correctly) that the Allies would enjoy an advantage in the number of fighter aircraft of over seven to one and large advantages in other categories of aircraft, the British Chief of Air

Staff actually contrived to show how the Luftwaffe would enjoy a numerical advantage of six to one! British leaders also raised the specter of the port of Cherbourg being turned into a

“bomb trap” while, presumably, the overwhelming force of the RAF, augmented by some of the thousands of warplanes and pilots already in the U.S. and waiting for deployment, stood idly by.250 The British added the false claim that the Germans outnumbered the Soviets in ground combat formations, with the implication that Germany could call back large numbers of troops to deal with an invasion, even though Britain’s own internal intelligence appreciation held that German forces in the West were extremely weak, that the bulk of their army was tied down in Russia and that even a Soviet collapse would not mean a real strengthening of their position in the West for months.251 Not surprisingly the British also played up fears regarding the weather, even though the SLEDGEHAMMER plan showed the risks involved were well within an acceptable range. Even when their objections were within the range of the plausible, they often subjected the plan to the kind of worst-case scenario arguments that few military proposed military operations could survive.

The curiously pessimistic projections for rate of buildup in the SLEDGEHAMMER plan, already mentioned, have to be assessed in light of the hostility of the British leadership.

Though this may have been just over-cautiousness, the documentary evidence strongly suggests another explanation. The one counterargument that seemed most compelling from

97 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra the SLEDGEHAMMER antagonists’ point of view was the lack of amphibious vessels. This was an objection the Americans could not get around, as more than one post-war memoir attests to. Apparently, in order to clinch the argument with their truculent American cousins, British authorities contrived to keep from the SLEDGEHAMMER planners, which by now included

American staff officers, the true extent of contemporaneous amphibious lift capability. This is undoubtedly the origin of the ubiquitous legend, that persists in full force to this day, that in

1942 the Allies “did not have enough landing craft” to successfully invade the continent across the English Channel.

The prequel to the story about available amphibious capacity goes back at least to the spring of 1942, when, during meetings with their American counterparts, various British officers argued forcefully that American landing craft and ships were unsuitable for a cross-

Channel operation. In April, British Captain Hughes-Hallett of Combined Operations

Headquarters insisted to his American interlocutors that small landing craft could not be used for an assault across the English Channel. The following month, British officers meeting with

American President Franklin Roosevelt argued that smaller craft would break down or swamp in the Channel and the Allies could not carry out a cross-Channel operation with small boats landing from American combat loaders. These representations astonished the participating

American naval officers, but seemed to convince the president.252 During the August Dieppe raid, however, scores of American-made small landing craft laden with combat troops crossed the entire English Channel, both over and back. Ironically, these landing craft were part of a naval force that was under the overall command of the same Capt. Hughes-Hallett.

Incidentally, these landing craft bore British Commandos, perhaps the only participating contingents that actually successfully completed their mission that day. Moreover, small

98 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra landing craft working in combination with larger amphibious ships served as the basis for the main landings at Dieppe, as they would in every subsequent major amphibious operation in the war, including OVERLORD. In effect, this dubious argument regarding American amphibious vessels took the lift for an entire division of 15,000 men off the table.

During the same time period the British War Cabinet received a report, dated 8 May, from the Ministry of War Transport regarding the availability of shipping for SLEDGEHAMMER.

The report states that the ministry could make available from British sources thirty “Cross-

Channel type passenger vessels” with an average capacity of 800 men, i.e., a total of 24,000 troops. Twelve of these, the report states, “have already been taken up for conversion” to

Infantry Assault ships (LSI’s) while eighteen other ships “are being earmarked.”253 A 30 June note by the Minister of War Transport documents the contents of a memorandum, which he had presented on 24 June to the British Chiefs of Staff (the Chiefs of Staff of the three British military services, as well as Mountbatten as commander of Combined Operations), and which confirmed, with a few minor adjustments, the findings of the 8 May report.254 Both of these documents made clear that the thirty landing ships in question are in addition to the landing ships already in service with Combined Operations. Taken together, these documents reveal that the British alone ought to have available landing ships capable of transporting more than

30,000 troops.

The information provided to the SLEDGEHAMMER planners, however, differed dramatically. According to the various summaries the planners received from Mountbatten’s

Combined Operations command, there would be only three LSI’s comparable to those mentioned in the Ministry of War Transportation memos, and perhaps four other similar ships, available even as late as 1 November. Therefore, the SLEDGEHAMMER planners

99 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra believe, as we have already seen, that they will only have at their disposal enough landing ships to transport 7,600 men in one lift. The existence of the twelve LSI’s that “have already been taken up for conversion” almost three months earlier is nowhere mentioned in any of the actual SLEDGEHAMMER planning documents, much less the other eighteen “earmarked” ships. When the British TORCH task forces departed home waters in late October, however, there were at least twenty-one British LSI’s and one similar type LSP in the two convoys, on which sailed, not coincidentally it seems, some 30,000 Allied troops. Though the American official history maintains, rather credulously, that “the British had managed to scrape together” for TORCH the shipping for 30,000 troops, the more likely explanation is that this capacity had been there all along and would have been available for SLEDGEHAMMER, adding some 24,000 troops to the overall potential total.255

The statistics found in documents prepared by Mountbatten’s Combined Operations

Headquarters (COHQ), also bear consideration. From at least early August 1942 and for the rest of the war, COHQ prepared weekly a comprehensive inventory, known as the “Green

List,” of all British controlled amphibious ships and craft. Near the front of each Green List are tables detailing the number of active amphibious vessels by type. Listed in the tables of available amphibious ships during this period are the three LSI’s known to the

SLEDGEHAMMER planners. At the back of these Green Lists, however, are the names of over

60 vessels that COHQ had identified as potential troop landing ships and designated as

“VESSELS NOT INCLUDED IN THE LIST IN WHICH LANDING CRAFT MAY BE

CARRIED.”256 The ships named in the back of the Green Lists have between them the capacity to transport and deploy at least 600 landing craft. It is unclear if these are in addition to the 30 ships the Minister of War Transport referred to in its memoranda of May and June,

100 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra but probably most if not all of those are included. At least eleven of the ships at the back of the Green Lists of 5 August 1942 end up participating as troop transports in the initial TORCH landings, in addition to which, at least another eight ships that are not found in the Green Lists of this period, also served as troopships for the opening phase of TORCH, according to other reliable secondary sources.

Needless to say, the demands placed on a ship in terms of seaworthiness and onboard facilities are far greater for a vessel required to sail over 2,000 miles across the open ocean on a voyage of many days than would be the case for one making a voyage of 6-8 hours across

100 miles or so of the English Channel. One only has to consider the numerous other improvised troopships both the Allies and the Axis employed during the war – from warships to hastily converted Liberty ships – and the relatively modest demands placed on a ships in service in the English Channel to realize that the number of troops that the Allies could have transported by ship for a SLEDGEHAMMER invasion was really only limited by the number of landing craft to unload them and the capacity to supply them once they have landed. Why the

SLEDGEHAMMER planners failed to notice this remains a mystery except to the extent that they were under the influence of the upper echelon hostility towards such an operation that

Richardson alludes to above.

The data found in the Green Lists also show a significant variance between the numbers

COHQ provided the SLEDGEHAMMER planners and what Mountbatten command’s internal numbers show with respect to expected availability of smaller landing craft. The figures

COHQ provided to the SLEDGEHAMMER planners predict that by 1 September there will be available only around 200 small landing craft and, a month after that, 440 small and 114 medium landing craft. COHQ internal numbers show, however, that by 4 August there are

“be delivered in U.K.” by the end of September. In fact, these “secret” internal projections proved to amazingly accurate. On 29 September the actual number of small landing craft stood at 896 and the medium landing craft at 166, even though by then the Allies, as we have already seen, had already long since changed their shipping priorities in favor of TORCH and thereby effectively wasted an enormous amount of potential shipping capacity that might have otherwise transported yet more of the several hundred landing craft then being produced every month in the U.S. One would also have to reckon on at least 250-300 additional small and medium landing craft that the available American combat loaders normally would carry.257

Moreover, if we are to take seriously the contemporaneous representations of Anglo-

American leaders and their postwar apologists that they were doing everything possible to make a Second Front a reality, we would also have to at least consider including in a potential

SLEDGEHAMMER pool of landing vessels most of the 450 landing craft that took part in the initial Guadalcanal landings (assuming that the Americans cancelled or delayed the invasion of that island in order to go all in for SLEDGEHAMMER).

This does not exhaust, however, the inventory of amphibious vessels that existed but were apparently unknown to the SLEDGEHAMMER planners. Both of the Ministry of War Transport memoranda and other documents mention the requisition for conversion of 1000 barges in the spring. By July most of these have arrived in English Channel ports.258 The 5 August Green

List totals for “Swim Barges” at Portsmouth and Plymouth is 929 (158 motorized and 771 un- motorized). The count the SLEDGEHAMMER planner received, however, is 200. It is at least possible that these barges are what showed up in the German photoreconnaissance flights of

June, which also noted the presence of at least 18 LSI’s, and which caused Hitler such great

102 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra alarm.259 Although he had clearly overestimated Allied amphibious capabilities, it is ironic that Hitler may have known more about these amphibious vessels than the SLEDGEHAMMER planners themselves, and all the more ironic since as late as mid-August the Americans in

England seem to be still in the dark as to the true number of American-made landing craft that are already in Europe.260

Remarkably, when the British TORCH convoys departed for North Africa in late October, they left behind in Britain almost 2,000 landing craft and ships.261 Virtually all of the vessels left behind in Britain were ones that were unable on their own to make the over 2,000-mile journey to North Africa, but did have the capability of participating in a cross-Channel operation. Not only did these vessels represent a large incremental capability in terms of the number of troops that could alight on an invasion beach, but an even larger one with respect to shore-to-shore capabilities. For the opening phase of TORCH, the Allied forces had to rely almost exclusively on the painfully slow process of lightering to get their vehicles and cargo ashore, and were then only slowly able to clear the beaches of supplies for lack of vehicles.

For SLEDGEHAMMER, however, they would have had the use of vessels sufficient to simultaneously transport nearly 7,000 vehicles (and any cargo that such vehicles might carry) on vessels capable of loading in British ports and offloading directly onto French beaches (in other words, in shore-to-shore mode), in addition to enough additional conventional merchant shipping to transport another 3,000 vehicles that could be landed by lighter (ship-to-shore).262

Another group of coasters, with a total capacity of 20,000 tons of cargo would be able to discharge stores directly on the beaches using the same beaching and drying-out technique as proposed for the quasi-LST’s envisioned for SLEDGEHAMMER and actually used for the genuine LST’s during OVERLORD. Assuming just one-fifth of the motor-transport vessels and

103 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra a similar proportion of the cargo ships could discharge themselves on an average day on the beaches of the Cotentin Peninsula, and that half the vehicles discharged carried an average of

3 tons of supplies, the Allies should have had a roughly 7,000 ton per day discharge capacity, even before Cherbourg came into useful operation, and though this was less than a third of what the British and Americans could discharge in Normandy during the opening phase of

OVERLORD, it would still be more than adequate to sustain a force of 10 army divisions and supporting personnel. By comparison, the American forces in Tunisia in early 1943 had to rely for supply principally on a single rail line that could transport only 2,000 tons per day.

Obviously, since logistical vessels supporting an operation across the English Channel would have a round trip distance just one-twentieth of what vessels supporting an operation in

North Africa would have to reckon on, the turnaround time for vessels participating in

263 SLEDGEHAMMER would only be a small fraction of what they would be for TORCH. Just as important is the fact that ships supporting TORCH were of the ocean-going type, which otherwise could have been transporting the prodigious output of American factories and farms, or raw materials from the British Commonwealth, across the North Atlantic, whereas most of the vessels that would have been involved in transporting and provisioning forces participating in SLEDGEHAMMER were coasters – a resource that was otherwise contributing little to the Allied war effort.

Compare the actual overall picture with respect to Allied amphibious lift capability that existed at the time to the representations of Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined

Operations (the British military command responsible for planning and executing amphibious operations), who claimed after the war that there existed at the time the capacity to land but

4,000 men on the beaches of northwest France.264 A fair, even conservative, analysis of

104 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra actual Anglo-American capabilities should put their combined simultaneous amphibious lift capability at around 90,000 men, with a total 10-20% higher certainly within the realm of possibility.† The still modest Anglo-American airborne capabilities would add another 3-

5,000 men to the total that could be landed in the opening phase of SLEDGEHAMMER. Thus, the Allied could well expect to land 10-20,000 support troops, have both a substantial combat force driving on Cherbourg to the north, and more than the three combat divisions in place at the neck of the peninsula, with perhaps even some formations in reserve, before the Germans, even by Hitler’s own reckoning, might hope to mount a major counterattack.

Although the story of apparent British mendacity would seem to cast them in a particularly harsh light, such a judgment must be qualified by certain extenuating circumstances. First of all, there were other occasions in the war in which the Americans used tactics against the British that was hardly in the spirit of “walking arm in arm to victory” as contemporaneous propaganda and even much postwar literature has portrayed it.

Fortunately, neither the British nor the Americans, once they lost an argument to the other side seems to have ever done anything as low as to deliberately sabotage the agreed upon strategy or operation in a way that would jeopardize the troops. Even to the extent that the leadership of the American War Department might seem to have been proven right all along, as it relates to their “superiority” over their British counterparts, it also had to be kept in mind that it may just be a case of having the right prejudices at the right time. It is certainly possible that had the German defenses along the French coastline truly been as formidable as

† This is not to suggest that all of these men would be able to land on SLEDHAMMER’S D-Day itself, though 36-48 hours from H-Hour – i.e. by dawn on D+2 – seems a reasonable period of time. Nevertheless, with 100 troops landing with every LCT (as the SLEDHAMMER plan envisions) and the over 1,000 small landing craft that ought to have been available, putting this many troops ashore in 24 hours is certainly not out of the question. When comparing these estimates to the actual achievements of OVERLORD, it must be kept in mind that in 1944 there was a greater, and perhaps exaggerated, emphasis put on landing a large number of vehicles than was the case in the SLEDHAMMER plan or the actual experience for TORCH, which meant a higher ratio of landing craft to landed troops.

105 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra many top British leaders (and many British and American postwar authors) wrongly feared them to be, Marshall, Stimson and the rest of the War Department would still have advocated an early cross-Channel attack. Moreover, once the decision went for TORCH, those in the

War Department, including Marshall, who had been advocates of SLEDGEHAMMER, conjured up any number of dangers and difficulties with respect to an invasion of French North Africa, some of which were every bit as spurious as those SLEDGEHAMMER opponents had used to argue against a cross-Channel invasion. Interestingly enough, once the Anglo-Americans decided for TORCH, it was the British who staked out the bolder position when it came to the details of exactly where Allied forces would land. The British wanted to risk a landing in

Tunisia itself, which, if successful, almost surely would have meant a campaign of a few weeks rather than the six-month ordeal that ultimately ensued. The Americans, now playing the role of the ultra-cautious, would have none of it and instead hyped up fears of the

Germans trapping the TORCH invasion force in the Mediterranean by capturing Gibraltar via

Spain, even after British authorities made powerful arguments rebutting such worries. It must also be recalled as well that Marshall initially favored the Pas de Calais version of

SLEDGEHAMMER that would have suffered from many drawbacks in comparison to the

Cotentin Peninsula version. Though it is to his credit that he eventually became a convert to the more feasible Cotentin Peninsula version, it was only under the influence of the arguments of British staff officers that he did so. It must also be added that these same British staff officers showed considerable imagination and resourcefulness in their attempts to address any number of thorny operational problems. As we have already seen, the SLEDGEHAMMER planning staff anticipated techniques some of which, such as the beaching of supply vessels,

American officers discovered only after D-Day.

106 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra Had key figures in the Anglo-American leadership mustered the requisite will in 1942 to venture a full-blooded cross-Channel invasion, they stood to reap huge rewards. A determination to do everything possible to make a true Second Front a reality in 1942 would have put into play enormous resources that were otherwise sidelined at the time. These include first of all a greater share of the already enormous output of Anglo-American armaments factories, air power in England, trained American and British troops, as well as

British coasters and other improvised amphibious vessels. It would have also meant the more efficient use of the one resource that was the bottleneck for virtually all of the other ones – merchant shipping – as well as the anti-submarine resources that made it possible for ships to deliver the cargoes that enabled the Anglo-Americans to play their proper role in the defeat of the Axis powers.

Even a modestly successful SLEDGEHAMMER would have brought enormous strategic pressure on Germany’s politically weak partners in southern Europe. Though it is impossible to predict just how this would have played out, at minimum it would have represented a major distraction for a German leadership whose attention was already divided too many ways. At maximum it would have meant the sudden and devastating collapse of Germany’s position both in the Mediterranean, and in southern Europe. The Allies may also have realized the opening up of the Mediterranean shipping route far earlier and with far less effort than what ultimately proved the case.

The Anglo-Americans also stood to reap political benefits with their Soviet allies. The opening up of a true Second Front in Europe would not only fulfill the assurances the Western

Allies had given their Soviet interlocutors during the course of 1942, they would have avoided the further aggravation of being unable to come through in the following year as well.

107 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra Coming during the critical period of the Battle of Stalingrad, while the outcome seemingly hung in the balance, would have conferred further, if un-quantifiable, psychological benefits.

The prospect of an even larger and more decisive defeat of German forces on the southern wing of the Eastern Front that SLEDGEHAMMER may have enabled is of greatest significance.

As it was, by the time the Allies did invade across the English Channel in 1944, the

Germans were much better positioned both strategically and tactically to meet an invasion. In

1942, Germany’s commitments on other fronts, chiefly on the Eastern Front, stretched its resources to the breaking point and meant that it could ill-afford to fight the full measure of

Anglo-American power even at the reduced state it had attained by that time. Like an over- inflated balloon, German power in the second half of 1942 was susceptible to a sudden implosion in a way it would not be later in the war. The Germans actually experienced something of a renaissance in the course of 1943 and early 1944 as can be seen in the growth of their ground forces and in their war production. Their late 1943 decision to refocus on the defense in the West also meant that their defenses there would greatly increase in strength.

There should be little doubt that the Germans used the time between the fall of 1942 and the spring of 1944 far better than the Allies did in terms of preparations for a cross-Channel attack and the subsequent campaign in the West.

At the same time, a Second Front in northwest Europe would have forced the German enemy to use its resources less efficiently at a time when its acute strategic overextension put it in a position where it could both least afford it, and also make it most vulnerable to dramatic reversals. Not only did SLEDGEHAMMER promise to significantly hinder Germany’s U-Boat war in 1942, it would also have placed considerably more demands on that country’s already overstretched pool of military resources on the ground and in the air. Its armaments

German military, even without a Second Front. The Germans were especially vulnerable in this regard in the important areas of artillery and tank production. German air power was also extended to the breaking point and it was only the inability of the Western Allies to engage the Luftwaffe in intensive operations at this time that delayed a decisive resolution of the overall air war. Moreover, the Allies missed an opportunity to catch the Germans in the midst of the greatest fuel shortage it would experience until well after the breakout from Normandy occurred two years later.

With the proper evaluation of the available evidence it would be tempting to state that the

Allies missed a golden opportunity in 1942. This study has set forth many reasons for believing that may have been the case. As with any other historical “what if,” however, there is no way to know for sure if SLEDGEHAMMER would have succeeded. The outcomes of battles and campaigns often turn on unpredicted and unpredictable contingencies.

Nevertheless, what one can gain from an honest comparison of the D-Day in June of 1944 that actually took place, and the one in the fall of 1942 that never did, is something of a fresh perspective on the strategic realities of World War Two. The simplistic but ubiquitous narrative that has Germany slowly worn down in the middle years of the war while the

Western Allies gradually gain the experience and know-how to take on their opponent on the beaches and battlefields of northwest Europe represents at best a half-truth.265 Certainly, the evidence of growing German overall industrial strength and military strength, in the West at least, contradicts the proposition that German power required a “softening-up” before D-Day could take place.266

109 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra Perhaps the greatest benefit we can derive from a more accurate reappraisal of the issues revolving around the timing of a Second Front, is to counteract a sometimes subtle but insidious distortion that has crept into the literature with respect to the development of the war in Europe. Of course, a historian can fairly treat the subject of the history of Second Front diplomacy and Anglo-American strategy without engaging in historical speculation: certain figures were in favor of an earlier Second Front for these reasons, and certain others opposed it for these other reasons. The moment a historian takes sides, endorsing the point of view of either the early Second Fronters or their opponents (and almost without exception historians have chosen to side with the latter group), that historian has the debt to at least get the facts right. If a historian, for example, claims the an earlier Second Front was not possible because the submarine war was not yet “won,” is there not an obligation to define what winning in that context means, and, at least generally, make an attempt to compare the level of shipping resources actually available against the operation actually being contemplated (as opposed to one that took place later) and, in turn, to balance that against the true capabilities of the opposition awaiting the invaders?

The same standard ought to apply to the air war as well. Interestingly enough, the Allies were fully aware of their material superiority with respect to air power during 1942. The

German high command, as we have already seen, had already reckoned on Allied air superiority in the case of a major landing in the West. Stalin too was familiar with the balance of power in the air war in the West.267 Even the British public, to the extent they put faith in Churchill’s BBC broadcast, may also known something of this situation. The only ones, it seems, who do not know of Allied air superiority in the West in 1942 are postwar historians. Even if one does not accept that the levels of material superiority the Western

110 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra Allies enjoyed in 1942 was sufficient for a successful cross-Channel operation, however, he could at least address the question of how Britain could outproduce Germany in aircraft by

50% or more for three years running and still not be able to win absolutely mastery of the air, despite the fact that by the third year Britain had the assistance of two powerful allies, each of which produced as much or more aircraft as it did. This does not even take into account the fact that Germany by then had to divide its air resources many different ways, whereas Britain kept most of its air power in England, nor the fact that the Luftwaffe had kept up a level of debilitating operational tempo that the RAF had not needed to, nor of the tremendous disadvantage Germany had to labor under with respect to the shortage of fuel and all that meant in terms of training an adequate number of pilots. If we abide by the “air war not yet won” narrative, however, such issues never come up.

One historian has wondered why the Americans had not, at the time the dispute over

SLEDGEHAMMER still burned hot, asked their British partners “how [they] could find landing craft for Torch…but not for Sledgehammer?”268 A more interesting question, however, is why no historian, including the one who wrote this passage, has ventured to ask, much less answer, this question, nor the related one about the entirely distinct set of landing vessels involved in the 19,000-man invasion of Guadalcanal.

Other authors are impressed by the fact that the Germans were forced to tie down twenty or more divisions in Italy due to the Allied campaign there, as if the number of German divisions were fixed by divine statute. As we have seen, however, the number of German divisions increased during the time in question by some 16 divisions. This was aided, in part, after the defection of Italy from the Axis, by the hundreds of thousands of Italian soldiers that were forcibly removed to Germany, where they became part of the German workforce. The

111 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra Germans also reaped a huge windfall when they were able to confiscate, at about the same time, the large Italian stocks of fuel, which, after all, represented the Achilles heel of German military might during much of the war. Moreover, in the second half of 1942 the Germans had far more than 20 divisions tied down in the great bulge extending into the Soviet

Caucasus. The bottom line is not how many German divisions had elsewhere, but how many they had in France. During the time in question that number doubled, and the divisions that were in France in the spring of 1944 were generally better trained, far better equipped, and, at least with respect to fuel, apparently far better supplied than their predecessor divisions had been in 1942.

By drawing the facile analogy between Dieppe and SLEDGEHAMMER does not the historian implicitly give the impression that German defenses along most if not all the coastline of occupied France was already equally formidable? Not only were German defenses weak along much of the French coastline, they were weak even just a few miles away from Dieppe itself, something a reasonable familiarity with the raid on that port would have revealed. And how does one square the putative strength of the German coastal defenses in 1942 with the reality that construction of the Atlantic Wall had at that time just barely begun, and with the well-known story of how Rommel greatly improved the quality of the defenses along the French coastline in the last few months before D-Day? The failure of the raid on Dieppe no more proves that a full-blown amphibious invasion elsewhere on the

French coast would have similarly failed than the ignoble surrender of the garrison at Tobruk in June 1942 proves that British and Dominion forces in North Africa were “not yet prepared” to withstand assaults by the German Africa Korps there, since the year before they withstood a siege of several months in the very same place.

112 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra Presumably this reflects a kind of “chronolatry,” originating from a generalized faith in progress over time. The grip this progress narrative holds on the imaginations on some authors is so strong that many of them fail to realize that, notwithstanding their affirmation of the benefit the experiences of the Mediterranean campaigns are supposed to have conferred on the forces of the Allies (especially the Americans), they are at a loss to demonstrate such progress in troop performance (with respect to units which are entering combat for the first time) with concrete examples from their own works, even when these same works, as they often do, offer specific examples in support of the contrary proposition. Perhaps this had something to do with their personal affections for particular leaders or emotional attachments they have for certain battles or campaigns. Somehow it is hard to work up the same enthusiasm for the proposition that OVERLORD was “quite the greatest thing we ever attempted” if it could be demonstrated that there was a more than reasonable chance of making an equally great impact on the outcome of the war nearly two years earlier. Just as some have tried to justify the sacrifice of Dieppe based upon a dubious lessons learned

“rationalizations,”269 others seem to have sought to justify the sidetrack into the

Mediterranean on the same basis.

Many historians who have written about SLEDGEHAMMER have been quick to dismiss the possibility that such a modest force, “hemmed-in” on the Cotentin Peninsula, could have helped the Soviets on the Eastern Front. Quite apart from the fact that the Stalin himself argued vigorously in favor of SLEDGEHAMMER, such an attitude betrays unfamiliarity with the actual military situation that developed over the course of the succeeding winter.270 The most telling sign of this is that none of them acknowledge the crucial role the divisions transferred from France to Russia played in the battles on the Eastern front during that period,

113 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra even in an attempt to explain it away. At least one recent Sledgehammer skeptic, in his zeal to “prove” the impossibility of an early Second Front manages to combine error with illogic: after inventorying in detail the reasons the Americans were woefully unprepared for combat with the Germans in France, he elsewhere claims that SLEDGEHAMMER would be primarily a

British affair. This same author expounds as well on the domestic political benefits Roosevelt could reap from TORCH, opining that in “a year of important Congressional election, Torch would give a first taste of victory,” apparently unaware that the TORCH landings did not come until after the elections in America and that the President’s party suffered such large reverses in those elections when they did take place, that he lost effective ideological control of

Congress.271 For some authors, apparently, one way or the other, the possibility of an early

Second Front cannot be countenanced, logical consistency and the facts notwithstanding.

This attitude has tended to mask some of the other less attractive aspects of the Anglo-

American war effort. The wastefulness incident to the changes in Allied priorities and the strategic decisions to make war in the most remote parts of the globe only comes into sharper relief in the context of a comparison between a D-Day in 1942 and on in 1944. Only a cross-

Channel strategy could enable the Western Allies to maximize their strengths while minimizing their weaknesses in the shortest possible time. The cancellation of

SLEDGEHAMMER, however, guaranteed the sort of dispersion American planners fought diligently against at the beginning of the war. Before long the Allies not only had major wars in different theaters, but also wars within wars even inside some of the individual theaters themselves. It is not just that the Allies, for example, conducted one large, expensive and resource intensive “strategic” air war against Germany only loosely connected to the overall

114 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra war, it is that they actually conducted two large, expensive and resource intensive strategic air wars against German that were only loosely connected to the overall war.

The gross wastefulness and dispersion of the Allied war effort is nowhere better exemplified than by the fact that as late at January of 1944 the planners for the upcoming cross-Channel invasion, who were putatively vested with the responsibility to make a reality of the most important Anglo-American strategic endeavor of the war, had at their disposal only enough landing craft for a three division landing on the French coastline, even though six months before at Sicily these same nations had demonstrated the capability of transporting and landing amphibiously a force of more than seven divisions, and this does not even count the amphibious lift capacity used in landing 30,000 troops the following month in the absolutely unnecessary “recapture” of Attu Island in the Aleutians (the Japanese had already evacuated weeks before), nor the fact that thousands of additional landing craft had been built in the meantime, nor the fact that there were significant amphibious resources in Britain that could not be used anywhere else in the world (e.g., barges and coasters).272 Some historians are prepared to entertain us with trivia about whether it was Montgomery, or Eisenhower, or

Montgomery and Eisenhower who wisely endeavored to expand the OVERLORD invasion plan to a viable scale, instead of asking the more fundamental question of how an alliance that has already produced a staggering 25,000 landing craft – a figure readily found in one of the more widely cited official histories273 – would not have long since allocated the mere 4-5,000 amphibious vessels required for such an undertaking, especially since it was ostensibly the pinnacle of Allied strategy. To do so, however, would involve asking more difficult questions about the quality of Anglo-American strategy than many historians seem comfortable with.

“institutional momentum” to get the better of sound military judgment such that an operation based upon what the commander of one of the few successful parts of the raid described as “a bad plan [with]…no chance of success” was allowed to go forward.274 One unexplored aspect in the development of Allied strategy was precisely how, after the cancellation of

SLEDGEHAMMER, the institutional priorities of the various branches of the American and

British militaries effectively brought about the dispersion outlined above. Indeed, it appears that it was internal institutional politics that led Mountbatten to play a key role in killing the

Cherbourg version of SLEDGEHAMMER (the only version left on the table) – effectively strangling his own baby in the crib – just prior to when his staff would solve the major problem with that version (the use of drop-tanks to extend fighter range).275 In the wake of

SLEDGEHAMMER’S cancellation, the unfortunate character of the committee of committees system the Anglo-Americans concocted to make war strategy (the Anglo-American

Combined Chiefs of Staff layered on top of the British Chief of Staff Committee and the analogous American Joint Chiefs of Staff) took over. Without firm direction from their political masters, war strategy became a matter of inter-allied compromises and inter-service deal-making. The consequent strategic muddle was not resolved until the politicians reasserted their rightful role at Teheran, where, at Stalin’s insistence, the military staffs, in this one important instance at least, were made to execute policy, not formulate it.276 The result was a firm commitment for OVERLORD and, at last, a measure of coherence for Allied strategy. The Soviets, for example, agreed to coordinate a summer offensive to support

OVERLORD. Just as importantly, the huge Anglo-American bomber forces had to eventually compromise on their fantasies of winning the war all by themselves and actually engage in

116 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra operations that were more directly helpful to the upcoming ground invasion. This is an analogue at a strategic level for the tactical concept of combined arms, which many authorities on modern ground combat have correctly identified as a key and vital component of combat power. The development of the war meant that the Anglo-American would continue to scatter their resources unnecessarily. The superabundance of American war production meant that this was no longer as important as it once had been, but the new emphasis on a cross-Channel attack managed to reverse significantly the trend towards dispersion of efforts between the different military branches.

This is not to insist categorically that a more efficient and coherent strategy could not have failed. The vagaries of war do not allow for such definitive predictions. If we must use such a high standard with respect to an earlier Second Front, however, we would have to rewrite every history book that questions the judgment of any political or military leader on the grounds that, whether their decisions led to success or not, we can never be sure that results would not have proved worse if that figure had chosen some alternative course of action, no matter how obviously more reasonable that alternative may seem in the light of all available evidence. Victory in war does not automatically confer wisdom on the winners; it only means, at best, that they were less unwise than the vanquished, or, even, that they were not so much more unwise than their opponents that they did not cancel out their other inherent advantages (such as the World War Two Allies enjoyed with respect to demography, industrial base, access to natural resources, and, relatively speaking, geographical proximity).

Among the most problematic distortion in the World War Two historiography involves the exaggerated representations concerning the supposed remarkable transformation Anglo-

American (or, for many authors, just American) forces achieved in the months leading up to

Allied combat performance that so many authors have claimed developed over this period.

The improvements that did take place were those that individual units engaged with the enemy acquired directly on the battlefield. What was necessary for this process to begin was not a preparatory period, but actually getting adequately trained American combat units in contact with the enemy where they could take the final steps in their learning process. They had the best opportunity to do so, however, in the context of a battlefield in which they denied their opponent his strong suit in mobile warfare and allowed them to take advantage of their strong suit in terms of firepower. The evidence strongly supports the proposition that the adoption of a strategy that gave a cross-Channel invasion top priority gave the Western Allies the best chance of succeeding on the battlefield. Equally important, however, was that such improvement that did occur did not originate for the most part at the institutional level. As one military historian has aptly put it: “[i]n World War II, American and British soldiers demonstrated time and again the ability to improvise success from failed plans…”277 To disproportionately transfer the credit for the successes of Allied troops to higher echelons is to ultimately take from them a measure of the credit they deserve as well as to present the wrong historical lessons.

Putting aside historical polemics, it must be admitted that in 1942 the Allies never could have mounted an operation anywhere near the size of OVERLORD. Given the different overall strategic situation in 1942, however, they did not need to do so. In the fall of 1942 the Anglo-

Americans did have the resources, the capabilities, and the opportunity to make a successful cross-Channel attack. Beyond that no one can ever say with any degree of certitude whether such an attack would have succeeded for the same reason no one can ever be sure about any

118 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra historical “what if.” The role of chance, especially in warfare, rules out anything approaching definitive conclusions along those lines. What we can say, with a great degree of certitude, is that by the time the Western Allies did make it across the English Channel in

June of 1944, the tasks they had in front of them, both on the beaches and in the hedgerows, was far more formidable than what they would have been in 1942. The Germans, despite the difficulties they faced with respect to limited resources and military setbacks on the Eastern

Front and in the Mediterranean, overall did a better job at improving their strategic and tactical defensive positions in the West. There is no doubt whatsoever that the soldier alighting on the beaches of Normandy and fighting his way through the tough hedgerow country that spring and summer of 1944 faced a much more daunting task than his counterpart would have in the fall of 1942. Nevertheless, the soldiers of the United States and Britain proved equal to the challenge. In the end, a comparison between D-Day 1942 and D-Day

1944 may tell us less about ostensible successes and failures on the part of German and Allied leaders and more about the real accomplishments of the everyday fighting men who won the war in Western Europe.

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Trevor-Roper, Hugh, ed. Hitler’s War Directives, 1939-1945. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 1964.

Truscott, Lucian K., Jr. Command Missions. Novato: Presidio Press, 1990.

Vego, Milan. “Clausewitz’s Schwerpunkt: Mistranslated from German—Misunderstood in English”, Military Review 87, 1, pp. 101-109.

Villa, Brian Loring. Unauthorized Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Warlimont, Walter, R. H. Barry tr. Inside Hitler’s Headquarters, 1939-45. Novato: Presidio, 1964.

Warman, Oliver. Omaha Beach. Caen: Memorial de Caen, 2004.

Weigley, Russell F. Eisenhower’s Lieutenants: The Campaign of France and Germany, 1944-1945. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990.

Westermann, Edward B. Flak: German Anti-Aircraft Defenses, 1914-1945. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2005.

Wilt, Alan F. The Atlantic Wall, 1941-1944. New York: Enigma, 2004.

______. War from the Top: German And British Military Decision Making During World War II. London: I. B. Tauris, 1990.

Zaloga, Steven. D-Day 1944: Utah Beach & U.S. Airborne Landings. Westport, CN: Praeger, 2004.

______. Kasserine Pass 1943: Rommel’s Last Victory, New York: Osprey, 2005.

Unpublished Sources (partial listing):

Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg, Germany, RH 24/84, Records for the German 84th Army Corps.

The National Archives of the UK, Public Record Office, DEFE 2/621, “Operation Wetbob.”

The National Archives of the UK, Public Record Office, ADM 189/147.

The National Archives of the UK, Public Record Office, DEFE 2/338.

The National Archives of the UK, Public Record Office, WO/106/4175, “The History of Sledgehammer.”

U.S. Army Service Forces, Control Division, Statistics Branch, “Statistical Review, World War II: A Summary of ASF Activities.”

U.S. National Archive and Records Administration, German Military Situation Maps of the Northern, Southern, and Western Theaters.

U.S. National Archive and Records Administration, Microfilm Publication T78, Records of Headquarters, German High Command, Roll 317.

U.S. National Archive and Records Administration, Microfilm Publication T315, Records of German Field Commands: Divisions, Roll 2035, 320th Infantry Division.

U.S. Army Service Forces, Control Division, Statistics Branch. Statistical Review, World War II: A Summary of ASF Activities.

1 For Dieppe see Russell A. Hart, Clash of Arms: How the Allies Won in Normandy (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 79: Sledgehammer was “quixotic…for as the Dieppe raid illustrated, a 1942 invasion would have ended in disaster.” Wilt, War From The Top: German And British Military Decision Making During World War II, 256: The failure at Dieppe “amply demonstrated” that the allies were “probably correct” in not going forward with Sledgehammer.” Carlo D’Este, Decision at Normandy (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994), 30: “What Dieppe did was to bury for ever the myth that Sledgehammer would have been feasible in 1942.” Jean Edward Smith, FDR (New York: Random House, 2007) 560- 1. Kasserine: Mark Perry, Partners in Command: George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), 175: “Kasserine showed that the British judgment of Sledgehammer had been correct. The searing truth was that if the Americans and their British allied had fought in France as they had fought in North Africa, they would have been soundly defeated.” Hart, p. 79. Ralph Bennett, Ultra and Mediterranean Strategy (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1989) 371-2. Ronald Lewin, Churchill as Warlord (New York: Stein and Day, 1973), 138. General skeptics: Terence Robertson, Dieppe: The Shame and the Glory (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1962), 38; Russell F. Weigley, Eisenhower’s Lieutenants: The Campaign of France and Germany, 1944-1945 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990), 29; Niall Ferguson, A War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (New York, Penguin, 2006), 525. Perhaps one of the more hysterical Sledgehammer skeptics is Douglas Porch, whose The Path to Victory: The Mediterranean Theater in World War II (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2004) is marred not only by dubious analysis but with factual and logical errors as well. Porch goes so far as to claim that a failed SLEDGEHAMMER would have “threatened” the “very fabric of democracy” in Britain and the United States (p. 672)! 2 A particularly egregious example of this error can be found in Porch, p. 330. 3 “The History of Sledgehammer,” The National Archives of the United Kingdom (TNA): WO/106/4175, p. 1. 4 Bernard Fergusson, The Watery Maze: The Story of Combined Operations (London: Collins, 1961), 144-5. 5 Dwight David Eisenhower, The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, The War Years: I (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970), 390. 6 Eisenhower p. 390; Mark Stoler The Politics of the Second Front: American Military Planning and Diplomacy in Coalition Warfare, 1941-1943 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1977), 56. 7 Fergusson, pp. 143-4. 8 Fergusson, p. 144. 9 Fergusson, pp. 144-5. 10 Eisenhower, pp. 388-393, 400-4. 11 Stoler, pp. 35, 48-9; Ernest J. King and Walter Muir Whitehill, Fleet Admiral King (New York: W. W. Norton, 1952), p. 395. 12 “The History of Sledgehammer,” TNA: WO/106/4175, pp. 8, 12, 16, 19; Stoler, pp. 35, 54. 13 Joseph L. Strange, “The British Rejection of Operation Sledgehammer, An Alternative Motive,” Military Affairs, Vol. 46, No. 1., (1982), 6. 14 Strange, pp. 7-14. 15 Stoler, p. 57-8. 16 Lucian K. Truscott, Jr., Command Missions (Novato: Presidio Press, 1990), 48-53; Eisenhower, 401. 17 C.C.(42) 42 (3rd Draft) “Operation Wetbob” from TNA: AIR 37/189 or DEFE 2/621. Operation WETBOB was the name assigned to SLEDGEHAMMER after it was cancelled in favor of TORCH. The WETBOB plan represents the “finishing touches” the planning staff made to SLEDGEHAMMER. 18 Joseph Balkoski, Utah Beach: Amphibious Landing and Airborne Operations on D-Day, June 6, 1944 (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2005), 310. 19 John P. Campbell, Dieppe Revisited: A Documentary Investigation (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1993), 57, 59-60. 20 Spitfires with drop-tanks took part in the Dieppe operation in August; Cf., Norman Franks, The Greatest Air Battle: Dieppe, 19th August 1942 (London: Grub Street, 1997), 201.. 21 Max Hastings also notes the irony of the British adopting the failed German city bombing strategy; cf. Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945 (New York: Vintage, 2004), 300. 22 Fergusson, pp. 144-5. 23 Matthew Cooper, The German Air Force, 1933-1945: An Anatomy of Failure, 1933-1945 (New York: Janes Publishing, 1981), 194.

127 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra 24 “S GMHEX 1 3787 9.10.42 2115 GKDOS AN O. K. H. / OP. ABT. TEGEMELDUNG VOM 9.10.1942,” U.S. National Archive and Records Administration (NARA): T-78/312/264582. 25 Campbell, p. 12. 26 Robert M. Citino, Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 213. 27 Balkoski, Utah Beach, p. 327. 28 Quoted in Robert O. Paxton, Parades and Politics at Vichy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 251. The same Vichy official attested to a similar attitude in conversation with American Amb. William Leahy: “When you have 3,000 tanks, 6,000 planes and 500,000 men to bring to Marseille let me know. Then we shall welcome you.” A remark by the Commander of the French colony in Morocco bears a remarkable similarity: “si les Américains viennet pour nous aider avec 25 divisions, des bateaux et des avions, je leur ferai construire des arcs de triomphe. Mais si l’on vient ici avec de commandos pour les réembarquer l’operation terminée et nous abandoner aux sanctions allemandes, je recevrai ces gens à coups de canons.” (If the Americans come to help us with 25 divisions, ships and planes, I will build them Arcs de Triomphe. But if they come with commandos for a temporary operation and then abandon us to revenge of the Germans, I will greet those men with cannon fire) Pierre Ordioni, Le Secret de Darlan: Le vrai rival de De Gaulle (Paris: Editions Albatros, 1974), 25-6. 29 Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, An Intimate History (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948), 550; Paxton, pp. 275, 277-8, 280, 282-290, 295-7, 307-308, 312-313. 30 Roland G. Ruppenthal, United States Army in World War II, The European Theater of Operations, Logistical Support of the Armies, Vol. II: September 1944-May 1945 (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1995) 124 31 Ruppenthal, Logistical Support of the Armies, II, p. 61. 32 Franks, pp. 192, 197, 201; Lord G.C.B. Tedder, With Prejudice: The War Memoirs of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Tedder G.C.B. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1966), 304. 33 Lawrence Wright, The Wooden Sword (London: Elek, 1967), 87. 34 Campbell, p. 51. 35 In 1941, Rommel’s forces consumed “proportionally ten times as much as the amount allocated to the armies preparing to invade Russia…” but this was before he extended his force’s lines of communications by several hundred miles. Martin van Creveld, Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 185- 6, 189-91. 36 David M. Glantz and Jonathon House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 108, 149; Hugh Trevor-Roper, ed., Hitler’s War Directives, 1939-1945 (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 1964), 182. 37 Walter, Warlimont, R. H. Barry tr., Inside Hitler’s Headquarters, 1939-45. Novato: Presidio, 1964), 240; Helmuth Greiner, Werner Meyer, tr., Greiner Diary Notes on the Situation Reports and Discussions at Hitler's Headquarters from 12 August 1942 to 17 March 1943 (Historical Division, United States Army Europe Foreign Military Studies Branch) 54, 56, 63; Joel S. Hayward, Stopped at Stalingrad: The Luftwaffe and Hitler’s Defeat in the East, 1942-1943 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 217, also testifies to the overall lack of reserves at this time. 38 Robert M. Citino, Death of the Wehrmacht (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 300. 39 Anthony Beevor, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943 (New York: Penguin, 1999), 69-70; cf. also Glantz and House, p. 108. 40 Hayward, p. 20. 41 Glantz and House, p. 120. 42 Hayward, pp. 158-9; Glantz and House, p. 120, 414-2. 43 Great Britain War Ministry, The Rise and Fall of the German Air Force (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983), 179, 182. 44 Hayward, pp. 158, 160-1, 164, 178, 313-4. 45 Air Marshall T Leigh-Mallory, “Report by the Air Force Commander on the operation against Dieppe – 19 August 1942”, TNA: AIR 205/204 reproduced in Franks, pp. 206-221, Appendix C. Cf. especially p. 219. 46 Cooper, p. 248. 47 The number of active crews in KG 2 had fallen from 88 the beginning of 1942 to just 23 in September “about half of which had come straight from training schools and lacked combat experience.” BA/MA: RL 2 III/721. Alfred Price, Kampflieger vol. 3: Bombers of the Luftwaffe, January 1942 - September 1943 (Surrey: Ian Allan Publishing Ltd., 2005), 206. 48 “Übersicht über Soll, Istbestand, Einsatzbereitschaft, Verluste und Reserven der fliegenden Verbänden,” Stand: 30.9.42, Stand: 31.5.44, Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, RL 2 III/721, RL 2 III/730.

128 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra 49 Great Britain War Ministry, pp. 284-5; Alfred Price, Luftwaffe: Birth, Life and Death of an Air Force (New York: Ballantine Books, 1969), 87. Training in 1943 roughly doubled the 1942 total; The German Air Force, 1933-1945, 320. 50 “Übersicht über Soll, Istbestand, Einsatzbereitschaft, Verluste und Reserven der fliegenden Verbänden,” Stand: 30.9.42, Stand: 30.11.42, BA/MA, RL 2 III/721. 51 Williamson Murray, Strategy for Defeat: the Luftwaffe 1933-1945 (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1983), 139. 52 German divisions were mobilized in a sequential series of waves with the first six waves organized by 1939 and the 35th and last wave organized in March of 1945. 53 George F. Nafziger, The German Order of Battle: Infantry in World War II (London: Greenhill Books, 2000), 26-30, 415, 432, 511. 54 “Kriegsgilderung, Anlage 64, Stand v. 1.10.42, 4. Anlage zu 320. I. D.” NARA: T-314/1603/554. 55 Campbell, pp. 20-1. 56 Jason Pipes, German Kriegsgilderung, 1939-45, 27-28, 46. The Germans formed fifteen of the 700 series “occupation” type of division in the spring of 1941. As with the 300 series static divisions there were no heavy weapons companies and only a single 50mm mortar in each infantry company, but they also consisted of only two infantry regiments and lacked antitank and infantry gun companies (Nafziger 27, 434). 57 “Entwicklungsmöglichkeiten der Lage im Westen,” Der Chef des Generalstabes, Ob. West, Heeresgruppenkommando D, H. Qu. 18.4.1942, NARA: T-78/317/6271195. 58 Alan F. Wilt, The Atlantic Wall, 1941-1944 (New York: Enigma, 2004), 51; “Niederschrift über die Besprechung beim Führer über den Atlantik-Wall am 13. August 1942 (2140 – 050 Uhr),” General der Pionerre und Festungen, O.U. dn 14.8.42, NARA: T-78/317/6271090. 59 Trevor-Roper, p. 173. Gordon H. Harrison,., Cross-Channel Attack (Washington: Center of Military History, 2002. Available on-line: http://www.history.army.mil/books/wwii/7-4/7-4_Contents.htm. Accessed 10 March 2009) in Appendix C, p. 460 renders the German as “sectors that are less endangered will be patrolled”. 60 Harrison, p. 141; David C. Isby, ed., Fighting the Invasion: The German Army at D-Day (London: Greenhill Books, 2000), 54: General Pemsel of the German 7th Army stated that his troops in 1942 were “poorly equipped” due to war in east. 61 Cooper, pp. 285; 805, Helmut Heiber and David M. Glantz, eds., Hitler and His Generals: Military Conferences, 1942- 1942 (New York: Enigma, 2003), 805, fn 227; Warlimont 265-6; Field Marshall Erich von Manstein, Anthony G. Powell, ed. and tr., Lost Victories (Novato: Presidio, 1982), 268-9. 62 SSD GHMEX 1 3675 9 9.10. 1130. NACHR. AN OKH / OP. ABT. NARA: T-78/317/6271562. 63 Harrison, p. 241. 64 Harrison, p. 242. 65 The estimate for German tanks in the West in the fall of 1942 is based on “Anlage 2 zu 10. Pz.Div. Ia Nr. G.Kdos. vom 1.10.1942,” NARA: T-315/570/262 and “Versorgungslage vom 6.Oktober 1942,” NARA: T315/424, which give the German tank strength of 10th Panzer Division on 1 October as 128 (including sixteen Mk IV’s with high-velocity 75mm guns) and 7th Panzer on 6th October as 70 (including 13 Mk IV’s with high-velocity 75mm guns). 66 Harrison (p. 241) lists the number of German tanks and assault guns in the West as of the end of April 1944 as 1,608, of which 674 were Mk IV’s and 514 Mk V Panthers. The Germans brought in another 67 Mk IV’s, 187 Mk V’s and 90 assault guns in May; in June the Germans brought in another 121 Mk IV’s, 256 Mk V’s, 15 assault guns, as well as 48 Mk VI Tigers, more than offsetting their combined losses of 227 of these types in that month; “Kraftfahrzeuge (gepanzert) – Heer – Westen,” 1.8.1944, NARA: T-78/145/6076157. 67 For 7th Panzer cf. NARA: T-315/424/808, 942, 943; for 10th Panzer, T-315/570/266; for 6th Panzer, “Divisionbefehl für die Versammlung zum Abmarsch im Alarmfalle ‘Kanalküste C’,” NARA: T-315/324/210-1, and for 6th and 10th Panzer, NARA: T-315/324/196-99. 68 Lewin, p. 138. 69 “K R C GHMEX1 1676 27.6.42 1325 AN OKH./ OP. ABT.,” NARA: T-78/312/271137; David Irving, Hitler’s War (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 402. 70 Campbell, pp. 78-80; Warlimont p. 239. 71 Campbell, p. 82. 72 “Aktennotiz uber Führerbesprechung am 2.8.42 (2130 – 2330) im Führerhauptquartier,” NARA: T-78/317/6271594. 73 Trumball Higgins, Winston Churchill and the Second Front (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), 5; “Niederschrift über id Besprechung beim Führe über den Atlantik-Wall” 13. August 1942 (2140 – 050 Uhr), NARA: T-78/317/6271090ff; “Führerrede zum Ausbau des Atlantik-Walles am 29.9,” Op. Abt. (Ia), 3.10.1942, NARA: T-78/317/6271567.

129 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra 74 Campbell, pp. 85-6, 90-92. The head of one of the German Army’s intelligence offices also held that U-Boat losses were proving to be a major impediment for the Allies; Campbell, p. 89. 75 Introduction by Gerhard L. Weinberg, in Heiber and Glantz, p. I; Warlimont, p. 256-8. 76 Warlimont p. 247; Campbell, p. 81. 77 Irving, pp. 419-425 78 Warlimont pp. 247, 264-5. 79 Warlimont, pp. 258-9. 80 Campbell, p. 46. 81 Campbell concurs with this opinion, for slightly different reasons, p. 89 82 7. Panzer-Division, “Versorgungslage vom 16.Oktober 1942,” – “Versorgungslage vom 28.Oktober 1942” NARA: T- 315/424/361-377; “Tätigskeitbericht für die Zeit vom 1.10. – 7.10.42.” NARA: T-315/424/1025. 83 “Anruf AOK 7 (Oblt.von Fournier)am 17.10.42 19,15 Uhr,” NARA: T-314/1603/510. 84 Joseph Balkoski, Omaha Beach: D-Day, June 6, 1944 (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2004), 343, estimates 4,700 casualties at Omaha; Balkoski, Omaha Beach, p. 40. 85 Balkoski, Utah Beach, 52. 86 “Combat Report and Experience Gained During the British Attack on Dieppe 19 august 1942,” 25 August 1942 (Translation of captured German document dated 26 February 1944), TNA: DEFE 2/338. 87 Balkoski, Omaha Beach, p. 50; Anthony Saunders, Hitler’s Atlantic Wall (Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 2001), 150. 88 “2. Anlage zu 320. Inf.Div., Ia Nr. 1212/42 g.Kdos. v. 2.10.1942,” NARA: T-315/2032/693. 89 Balkoski, Utah Beach, pp. 185, 186. 90 Ibid, p. 180; DEFE 26/621 “Operation Wetbob,” p. 19, TNA: DEFE 26/621; Balkoski, Utah Beach, p. 186. 91 “2. Anlage zu 320. Inf.Div., Ia Nr. 1212/42 g.Kdos. v. 2.10.1942,” NARA: T-315/2032/693; Steven Zaloga, D-Day 1944: Utah Beach & U.S. Airborne Landings (Westport, CN: Praeger, 2004), 66. Cf. also, J. E. Kaufmann and H. W. Kaufmann, Fortress Third Reich: German Fortifications and Defense Systems in World War II (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003), 303-6. 92 “Anlage 2 zu Sept. 1942” LXXXIV AK. 93 Balkoski, Utah Beach, p. 51-2. 94 Kaufmann and Kaufmann, p. 306. 95 Harrison, p. 248. 96 Isby, p. 100. 97 “MG Bt 17,” BA/MA, RH 37, Kart 24-17; Jason Long, “Independent Machinegun and Mortar Battalions of the Wehrmacht,” http://sturmvogel.orbat.com/mg.html. Accessed 15 March 2009. 98 “Operation Wetbob,” TNA: DEFE 26/621, p. 19; “2. Anlage zu 320. Inf. Div.,” Ia Nr. 1212/42 gKdos. v. 2.10.42, NARA: T-315/2032/693. 99 “Verstärkung Normandie, 14.5.1944,” NARA: German Military Situation Maps of the Northern, Southern, and Western Theaters, Box 38, K 5-21; Isby, p. 106. 100 “Lagekarte Okt. Gen. Kdo. LXXXIV A. K. Stand 8.10.42,” Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, RH 24/84. 101 Milan Vego, “Clausewitz’s Schwerpunkt: Mistranslated from German—Misunderstood in English”, Military Review 87, 1, pp. 101-109. In this connection Vego quotes Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg: “An operation without Schwerpunkt is like a man without character.” 102 William Breuer, Hitler’s Fortress Cherbourg (New York, Stein and Day, 1984) 13. 103 Cf. for example the remarks of three different officers in Isby, pp. 25, 34, 100. 104 Robertson, pp. 48, 50-1. 105 Cf. also, Adrian Lewis, Omaha Beach: A Flawed Victory (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 275. 106 Brian Loring Villa, Unauthorized Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 11. 107 James Leasor, Green Beach (New York: Dell, 1975), 20-1. 108 Steven J. Zaloga, Kasserine Pass 1943: Rommel’s Last Victory (New York: Osprey, 2005), 29. 109 Martin Blumenson, Kasserine Pass: Rommel’s Bloody, Climatic Battle for Tunisia (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000) 117-8. 110 U.S. Army Service Forces, Control Division, Statistics Branch. Statistical Review, World War II: A Summary of ASF Activities, p. 5, Chart 5. 111 Rommel Papers, p. 407. 112 John Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad: Stalin’s War with Germany (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 10. 113 Greiner, p. 105.

130 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra 114 John Erickson, The Road to Berlin: Continuing the History of Stalin's War with Germany (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983), 7, 13-4. 115 David M. Glantz, From the Don to the Dnepr: Soviet Offensive Operations, December 1942 to August 1943 (Frank Cass and Company Limited, London, 1991), 14-7. 116 Glantz, From the Don to the Dnepr, 121. 117 Glantz, From the Don to the Dnepr, 122-6. 118 Campbell, 18-19, 90. 119 Glantz, From the Don to the Dnepr, 88. 120 Manstein, 411. 121 Cf. Bennett, 371. 122 “Statistical Review, World War II: A Summary of ASF Activities,” U.S. Army Service Forces, Control Division, Statistics Branch, Chart 5, p. 5. 123 “Vergleich der deutschen and der russischen Waffenfertigung 1942/1943,” 12 August 1943, NARA T-78/144/6075627; The average acceptances for April-August 1944 was 631, “Nachweisugn über die abgenommenen Waffen und Geräte im Berichtsmonat:…” T-78/152/6083836, 6083856, 6083875, 6084016, 6084056. 124 NARA T-78/176/6114935; T-78/152/6084012, 6084052. 125 Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 331-2. 126 “Panzerbestand Ost, OKW, Heimat, Bestand 1.Des Mts., Einhalten sind: Pz IV-IV + Bef.Wg. Stu.Pz, Ost U. OKW Gen.Qu. Nach In 6,” NARA T-78/145/60758665. 127 NARA T-78/144/6075035 and T-78/172/6110373-81. 128 David MacIsaac, ed., The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Vol. 1, The Effects of Strategic Bombing on the German War Economy (New York: Garland, 1976), 187, quoted in Edward B. Westermann, Flak: German Anti-Aircraft Defenses, 1914-1945 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 297. 129 The Luftwaffe trained 4,591 pilots in 1942 and 9,593 in 1943; Cooper, p. 320. 130 “German Air Force Front Line Strength during the European War 1939 – 1945, Comparison of German Quartermaster- General’s official records with figures published during the course of the war by A.I.3.b. in Orders of Battle and the Weekly Disposition Sheet,” TNA: AIR 40/1207. 131 “Pressure mines,” TNA: ADM 189/147; Ruppenthal, Logistical Support of the Army, II, 69-70; Samuel Elliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Volume XI, The Invasion of France and Germany, 1944 – 1945 (Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 2001), 171, 172, 217; Balkoski, Utah Beach, 74. 132 Weigley, p. 65: “By D-Day, Allied aircraft dropped 36,200 tons of bombs in 25,150 bombing sorties against the V- weapon sites, of which the VIII Bomber Command of the Eighth Air Force accounted for 17,600 tons and 5,950 tons.” 133 Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945 (New York: Vintage, 2004), 191. 134 Great Britain War Ministry, pp. 347-8. 135 Cooper, pp. 348-9. 136 Hayward, p. 311. Cf. also, Murray, Strategy for Defeat, p. 272. 137 Cooper, p. 349. 138 Martin van Creveld, Fighting Power: German and U.S. Army Performance, 1939-1945 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1982), Table 6.10, 56. 139 Heinz Magenheimer, eng. trans. Helmut Bögler, Hitler's War: Germany's Key Strategic Decisions, 1940-1945 (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1998), Table IV, p. 180. 140 One author puts the figure of Italian soldiers forced to work in Germany after the volte-face at 716,000; cf. Matthew Parker, Monte Cassino: The Hardest-Fought Battle of World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 21 141 Trevor-Roper, p. 218-9. 142 Harrison, pp. 149, 246-7. 143 Harrison, p. 248. 144 Harrison, pp. 147-8; Hart, pp. 220-30. 145 352nd Div. only had 3 hours a day to train; Isby, p. 128; 320.Inf.Div., Div.Stb.Qu, 1.10.42, “Abloesung und Ausbildung,” NARA: T-315/2032. 146 Isby, p. 88. 147 Balkoski, Omaha Beach, p. 10. 148 Joseph Balkoski, Beyond the Beachhead; The 29th Infantry Division in Normandy (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1999), 71. 149 Balkoski, Omaha Beach, p. 49. 150 Balkoski, Omaha Beach, p. 22: Almost 10,000 on Omaha Beach alone.

131 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra 151 Samuel Elliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Vol. II: Operations in North African Waters, October 1942 – June 1943 (Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 2001), 58, 81 152 Roland G. Ruppenthal, United States Army in World War II, The European Theater of Operations, Logistical Support of the Armies, Vol. I: May 1941–September 1944 (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1995), 393, 422-6; Morison, Invasion of France and Germany, pp. 164-5. 153 Lewis, Omaha Beach, pp. 17, 219. 154 Lewis, Omaha Beach, pp. 251-2. 155 Campbell, 11-2, 219. 156 Lewis, Omaha Beach, 74, 152, 257; Balkoski, Beyond the Beachhead, 123-4. 157 Balkoski, Beyond the Beachhead, p. 124. 158 Adrian Lewis, “The Navy Falls Short at Normandy,” Naval History, Vol. 12, No. 6, December 1998. 159 Williamson Murray, “Needless D-Day Slaughter,” Military History Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 3, Spring 2003, p. 30. 160 Weigley, pp. 72-3. 161 Lewis, Omaha Beach, pp. 45-7. 162 Cf., for example, Richard Angelini, “Battle Star—‘Tank Buster’ at Salerno,” http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/Barracks/1041/salerno.html. Accessed 25 March 2009; W. G. F. Jackson, The Battle for Italy (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 52; Des Hickey and Gus Smith, Operation Avalanche: The Salerno Landings, 1943 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983), 109, 115. 163 Lewis, Omaha Beach, pp. 212-3, 226-31. 164 Ruppenthal, Logistical Support of the Army, I, p. 380; Lewis, Omaha Beach, p. 77; John A. English and Bruce I. Gudmundsson, On Infantry (Westport: Praeger, 1994) 113; Morison, Operations in North African Waters, p. 83; Balkoski, Omaha Beach, 168. 165 Lewis, Omaha Beach, p. 256. 166 Michael D. Doubler, Closing with the Enemy: How GIs Fought the War in Europe, 1944-1945 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1994), 236-7, Table 9.1 167 Balkoski, Utah Beach, pp. 141. 168 Morison, Invasion of France and Germany, p. 138, 100-1; Balkoski, Utah Beach, pp. 174, 180; Balkoski, Omaha Beach, 207. 169 Oliver Warman, Omaha Beach (Caen: Memorial de Caen, 2004), 41. 170 Cf., for example, Hart, pp. 79, 82. 171 Morison, Invasion of France and Germany, p. 138. 172 Warman, pp. 49, 51. 173 Balkoski, Omaha Beach, 200. 174 Robertson 175 Balkoski, Beyond the Beachhead, 155-6. 176 Lewin, 138 (incl. footnote). 177 Doubler, pp. 236-7, Table 9.1 178 Doubler, p. 60. 179 Peter R. Mansoor, The GI Offensive In Europe: The Triumph of American Infantry Divisions, 1941-1945 (Lawrence, KS: The University Press of Kansas, 1999), 94; cf. also, Weigley, p. 126. 180 Mansoor, p. 161. 181 Weigley, p. 134. 182 Lewis, Omaha Beach, 238. 183 Doubler, p. 66. 184 Mansoor, p. 99. 185 Weigley, p. 35. 186 Campbell, p. 220. 187 W.E. DePuy, R.L. Brownlee and W.J. Mullen, eds., Changing An Army: An Oral History of General W.E. DePuy, USA Retired (Washington, DC: U.S. Military History Institute and U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1988), 90. 188 DePuy, p. 177. 189 Anonymous reviewer, Stone & Stone - Second World War Books; http://www.sonic.net/~bstone/archives/990905.shtml (Accessed 5 January 2009). 190 Leo Daugherty, The Battle of the Hedgerows: Bradley’s First Army in Normandy, June – July 1944 (St. Paul: MBI Publishing, 2001), 56

132 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra 191 Cf., for instance, Porch p. 330, where the author proclaims breathlessly that following a Sledgehammer landing the “ensuing battle, assuming it lasted more than twenty-four hours, would make Rommel’s shoot-up of the Eighth Army at Gazala and Tobruk look like a Boy Scout outing.” Porch conveniently forgets that the same Eighth Army stopped Rommel decisively at the El Alamein line just weeks later and without, obviously, the benefit of the experience gained in the subsequent campaign in the Mediterranean. 192 DePuy, 200-1. 193 English and Gudmundsson, p. 105. 194 Weigley, 28. 195 Erwin Rommel, B. H. Liddell Hart, ed., The Rommel Papers (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1956), 406-7. 196 Mansoor, 79. 197 Paul F. Gorman, The Secret of Future Victories (Fort Leavenworth: Combat Studies Institute U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 1992) 198 DePuy, p. 91. 199 Mansoor, pp. 98, 257. 200 Shelford Bidwell and Dominick Graham, Fire-Power: The British Army Weapons and Theories of War, 1904-1945 (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2004), 239. 201 Cf., for example, Lewin, p. 138. 202 Tedder, p. 400. 203 Bradley and Blair, A General’s Life (1983), 178, quoted in Lewis, Omaha Beach, p. 148. 204 Tedder, pp. 333-4, 400. 205 “Notiz zur Besprechung mit Hrrn Gen.Major Schmundt,” 22.3.1942; NARA: T-78/271245-271249. 206 “Grunlegender Befehl des Oberbefehlshabers West Nr. 13,” NARA: T-78/317/27034. Rundstedt reaffirmed these orders on 26 September 1942; “Grunlegender Befehl des Oberbefehlshabers West Nr. 15,” NARA: T-78/317/27051-27054. 207 “Führerrede zum Ausbau des Atlantik-Walles am 29.9,” Op. Abt. (Ia), 3.10.1942, NARA: T78/317/6271571. 208 “Operation Sledgehammer. RAF Role,” TNA: AIR 20/4842; “Übersicht über Soll, Istbestand, Einsatzbereitschaft, Verluste und Reserven der fliegenden Verbänden, Stand: 30.9.42,” BA/MA, RL 2 III/721. 209 See the interchange between Hitler and the Chief of Staff of the Luftwaffe Hans Jeschonnek in which Jeschonnek acknowledges for the last several months of 1942 German fighter production has outstripped the training of new fighter pilots; Heiber, p. 69. 210 Richard M. Leighton and Robert W. Coakley, U.S. Army in World War II: Global Logistics and Strategy, Vol. I: 1940- 1943 (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1955), 276. 211 “Jagdverbände, Blatt 3” and “Übersicht über Soll, Istbestand, Einsatzbereitschaft, Verluste und Reserven der fliegenden Verbänden,” Stand: 30.9.42, BA/MA, RL 2 III/721; “Establishment and Strength of R.A.F and W.A.A.F. in Fighter Command,” TNA: AIR 20/1980 212 For a discussion of the failure of the RAF fighter sweeps see Allen Andrews, The Air Marshals (New York: William Morrow, 1970), 135 and John Terraine, A Time for Courage (New York: Macmillan, 1985) 284. 213 Williamson Murray, “Attrition and the Luftwaffe,” Air University Review, v. XXXIV, No. 3 (Mar-Apr 1983), pp. 66-77. 214 An objection to an early Second Front on the grounds that the war against the U-Boat had yet to be won can be found in Lewin, p. 138. 215 Leighton and Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy I, p. 741, Appendix H-1. 216 Leighton and Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy I, p. 717, Chart 17. 217 Leighton and Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy I, pp. 433-5, 612-3. 218 Kevin Smith, Conflict Over Convoys: Anglo-American Logistics Diplomacy in the Second World War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 79. 219 Leighton and Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy I, 558. 220 Leighton and Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy I, pp. 569, 583, 731, Appendix D. 221 William H. Standley and Arthur A. Ageton, Admiral Ambassador to Russia (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1955), 246-7; “While the great Battle of Stalingrad hung in the balance, the shipment of supplies from the United States fell far behind Second Protocol schedules.” Leighton and Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy I, 586. 222 Stoler, The Politics of the Second Front, 48. Interestingly enough, in November of 1942, Roosevelt wrote to Churchill that “we should try to have our cake and eat it too.” Smith, Conflict Over Convoys, p. 242. 223 Stoler, 50. 224 Clay Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War, Vol. II: The Hunted, 1942-1945 (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 708. 225 A total of 81 destroyers accompanied the three TORCH task forces; Vincent Jones, Operation Torch (New York, Ballantine, 1972), 57.

133 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra 226 Global Logistics and Strategy 1940-1943, p. 613. 227 Smith, Conflict Over Convoys, pp. 79, 92; Global Logistics and Strategy 1940-1943, Appendix H-1, 741. 228 Smith, Conflict Over Convoys, pp. 79-80; Leighton and Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy I, 671, Appendix E-2, 733. The original TORCH plan called for 218 ships from the US and another 160 from the UK “continuously engaged,” in supporting that operation (Leighton and Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy I, pp. 461-2) vs. the 225 ships in projected savings (over a five-month period) with the opening of the Mediterranean. 229 Smith, Conflict Over Convoys, p. 208. 230 Smith, Conflict Over Convoys, pp. 73, 77-9, 88, 101, 110, 178. 231 Leighton and Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy I, 431. 232 Leighton and Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy I, Appendix A-6, “Cargo Vessel Turnaround Time in Days: 1943,” p. 725. 233 Leighton and Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy I, 453-4. 234 Smith, Conflict Over Convoys, p. 155. 235 Using factors from Appendix A-5, “Maintenance Requirements, European and Pacific Area, World War II,” Leighton and Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy I, 825. 236 Ruppenthal, Logistical Support of the Army, II, p. 124; Ruppenthal, Logistical Support of the Army, I, p. 237. 237 Overy, p. 161. 238 Lewis, Omaha Beach, p. 109. 239 Ruppenthal, Logistical Support of the Army, I, pp. 413-4 240 Ruppenthal, Logistical Support of the Army, I, pp. 407, 411. 241 Ruppenthal, Logistical Support of the Army, II, p. 57; Ruppenthal, Logistical Support of the Army, I, p. 398. 242 “Meteorological Conditions, Revised Appendix ‘L’ to Combined Commanders. Operation ‘WETBOB’ – Appreciation”, C.C.(42) 42 (3rd Draft), 30 July 1942, TNA: DEFE 2/621; emphasis added. 243 Cf. for example “Operation ‘Sledgehammer’ Comparison of Pas de Calais and Cotentin Peninsula”, C.C.(42) 38 (3rd Draft), 21st July, 1942, TNA: PRO PREM 3/333/1. Page 6 makes a explicit comparison of landing conditions between Pas de Calais and the Cotentin Peninsula in favor of the latter, noting that the beaches in the Pas de Calais area are more or less “completely exposed to the prevailing winds.” It also states that “prevailing winds in October and later months are Westerly and South-Westerly…” 244 Joseph L. Strange, “Cross-Channel Attack, 1942: The British Rejection of Operation Sledgehammer and the Cherbourg Alternative” (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1984), 455. 245 J.M. Stagg, Forecast for Overlord (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), 113. 246 Morison, The Invasion of France and Germany, p. 100. 247 Ruppenthal, Logistical Support of the Army, I, p. 411. 248 Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. IV: The Hinge of Fate. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), 479, 484. 249 Lt. Cdr. Richardson, “Recollections of the Planning of Neptune,” TNA: ADM 223/287; emphasis added. 250 Churchill, p. 309; Richard E. Steele, The First Offensive, 1942: Roosevelt, Marshall, and the Making of American Strategy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973) 171-2. 251 Steele, p. 171; British Joint Intelligence Committee report of 27 May 1942. Joseph L. Strange, “The British Rejection of Operation Sledgehammer, An Alternative Motive,” Military Affairs, Vol. 46, No. 1. (Feb., 1982), pp. 6-14. 252 Leighton and Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy I, 378-9. 253 C.O.S. (42) 129 (O), 8th May, 1942, “War Cabinet, Chiefs of Staff Committee, Operation ‘Sledgehammer’. Memorandum by the Ministry of War Transport,” TNA: CAB 80/62/54. 254 C.O.S. (42) 192 (O), June 30, 1942, “Operation ‘Sledgehammer.’ Note by Minister of War Transport.” 255 Leighton and Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy I, p. 423. 256 “‘Green List’ Ships and Craft of Combined Operations Command, Corrected to 4th August, 1942,” 5th August 1942, TNA: ADM 210/1. 257 This would represent well under half the number of landing craft the Americans carried to North Africa in their own combat loaders. The Torch Western Attack Force comprised a total of 629 landing craft (Morrison, 80), and there would have been a smaller number of such craft on the handful of American combat loaders taking part in the Eastern Attack Force. 258 Campbell, p. 61. 259 Campbell, p. 97. 260 Eisenhower’s aid, Capt. Harry C. Butcher, captures this exchange in his diary entry from London of 17 August 1942: “Clark emphasized shortage of landing craft. Only eighteen of one type and about eighty of another, which he thought was

134 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra a pitiful trickle from the much ballyhooed American production. Both he and Ike wondered where all this production is going.” Harry C. Butcher, My Three Years with Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946), 61. 261 “‘Green List’ Ships and Craft of Combined Operations Command, Corrected to 10th November 1942,” 11 November 1942, p. 5, TNA: ADM 210/1. 262 C.O.S. (42) 129 (O), 8th May, 1942, “War Cabinet, Chiefs of Staff Committee, Operation ‘Sledgehammer’. Memorandum by the Ministry of War Transport,” TNA: CAB 80/62/54; Morison, Operations in North African Waters, p. 159. 263 The initial Torch convoys sailed 2,300 miles from Britain and 4,500 mile from the U.S.; Jones, p. 42. By contrast, the SLEDGEHAMMER landing areas were only a little over 100 miles from southern England. 264 Cf. for example D’Este, p. 25n, and Fergusson, p. 152, which puts the number at 4,300 a figure it attributes to a report of the British Chiefs of Staff (of which Mountbatten was a member). 265 Cf., for example, Porch, p. 332. 266 Cf., for example, Lewin, p. 138; Andrew Roberts, Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West (New York: Harper, 2008), 219-20, 222. 267 Churchill, Hinge of Fate, p. 438. 268 Villa, p. 180. 269 Villa, pp. 17-8. 270 Churchill, Hinge of Fate, p. 438. 271 Porch, pp. 330, 332, 677. 272 With respect to Attu, cf. King and Whitehill, pp. 438, 443, fn 16: “In regard to the Aleutian Islands, the United States had bided its time in operations against Attu, for it was considered that there was little danger to Alaska or the western part of the North American continent unless the Japanese should succeed in occupying Kodiak Island, which was a very remote possibility…. The recapture of Attu in May was undertaken because the necessary men and ships happened to be available…the Japanese were not increasing their presence in the Aleutians or doing anything noteworthy there…” [Emphasis added] 273 Richard M. Leighton and Robert W. Coakley, U.S. Army in World War II: Global Logistics and Strategy, Vol. II: 1943- 1945 (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1968), 1943-1945, p. 829, Appendix B. 274 Villa, pp. 3, 5. 275 Villa, 174-84. According to Villa, in order to kill SLEDGEHAMMER, Mountbatten emphasized the lack of landing craft at this time. Mountbatten, as head of COHQ, was, of course, uniquely placed to control the information the SLEDGEHAMMER planners received about landing vessels. Villa seems to be unaware, however, that the SLEDGEHAMMER planners had found a solution to the fighter-range problem, and also appears to share the illusions of other historians about the contemporaneous capabilities of the Luftwaffe. Villa’s account of the inner workings of the British high command also tends to lend credence to the idea that the attitude of the highest ranking officers affected the overall assessments of at least some of the more important officers charged with evaluating the viability of SLEDGEHAMMER (cf. p. 176). 276 Hastings Lionel Ismay, The Memoirs of General Lord Ismay (New York, Viking, 1960), 338; Robin Edmonds, The Big Three (W.H. Norton & Co., New York, 1991), 342. 277 Lewis, Omaha Beach, p. 85.