Читать книгу Sicily '43 - James Holland - Страница 16

IN THE LAST WEEK of June 1943, from Egypt across North Africa to Algeria and northern Tunisia, Allied troops were getting ready for what was to be the largest amphibious invasion the world had ever known. A pivotal moment in the war had been reached. On the Eastern Front, German forces were about to go on to the offensive once more, this time to try and straighten the Kursk salient following the retreat from Stalingrad back in February. In the Atlantic, the U-boats had been withdrawn after catastrophic losses, allowing Allied shipping finally to flow freely across that vast ocean for the first time since the start of the war. British and American bombers were attacking the Reich both day and night, while – after three long years of fighting – all of North Africa was now in Allied hands. And the future of Italy looked uncertain, to say the least, the Fascist state now reeling in the face of plummeting public morale, a string of military defeats and an economy in shreds.

There was a palpable sense that the noose was starting to tighten around Nazi Germany; and yet for the Allies to cross the sea and capture Sicily would be a mammoth undertaking. The challenges of such an operation, both logistically and in the levels of coordination needed between services and between coalition partners feeling their way in this war, were immense. Hovering over the Allies, too, was the knowledge that less than a year hence they would be attempting to cross the English Channel and invade German-occupied France; the last sizeable strike, at Dieppe in August 1942, had been an utter disaster. If Sicily went wrong, if it turned into catastrophe or even a long and bloody slog, then the ramifications would be enormous. The long road to victory would become even longer; the cross-Channel attack might have to be postponed. Reverses, at this critical stage in the war, simply could not be countenanced. They were unthinkable.

The stakes, then, could hardly have been higher. The invasion of Sicily had to be a success. Yet for the senior Allied commanders far away across the Mediterranean, in Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt – from where the troops who would soon be attempting to land there were training – conquest of this ancient, even mystical, island seemed a very formidable undertaking indeed.

Most of the men now being put through their paces in North Africa were oblivious to such concerns. Training at Kabrit near the Suez Canal were the men of 69th Brigade, part of 50th ‘Tyne Tees’ Division, who would be part of the British landing force around Avola on the east coast of Sicily – not that Bill Cheall and the lads of the 6th Green Howards had any idea of that. ‘We realised that we were going to invade somewhere,’ noted Cheall, ‘but, of course, how could we know where at that time?’1 The war had already been going on a long time for Cheall, a former greengrocer from Middlesbrough in north-east England. Joining the Territorial Army in the spring of 1939, aged just twenty-one, he had been mobilized on the outbreak of war that September, and had served in France with the 6th Green Howards. Escaping from Dunkirk, he’d then begun the process of retraining before being laid low with chronic sinusitis and so had not gone overseas with the battalion when they’d first been posted to the Middle East. Instead, he’d spent some time with the 11th Battalion, before finally being shipped overseas and rejoining his old unit at the end of March 1943. He’d been shocked by how few were left from the battalion that had escaped from Dunkirk, but after the Battle of Wadi Akarit, when Eighth Army had crashed into the Italians in southern Tunisia back at the beginning of April, he had begun to realize why. Being in the infantry was a tough, bloody, attritional business. Sooner or later, one was bound to come a cropper. One just had to hope it wouldn’t be a fatal one.

They’d advanced to Enfidaville further north in Tunisia, then had been pulled out of the line. At the time, no one had the faintest idea why, but they were glad to be spared the final battles of the long North African campaign, which had not finally ended until mid-May. Back they went, some 2,000 miles, past previous battle sites, down into Libya, through Cyrenaica and then finally into Egypt once more. The carnage of war had been evident all the way: burnt-out tanks and vehicles, guns and the vast detritus of war. As they’d passed back through Wadi Akarit, Cheall had said a small prayer to himself. ‘I imagined the faces of the pals I had lost,’ he noted, ‘and could see them just as they were before they gave their lives.’2 Eventually, they’d stopped at Sidi Bishr near Alexandria before moving again to Kabrit. Training continued, including Exercise BROMYARD in the Gulf of Aqaba, where they relentlessly practised amphibious assaults. The heat was intense and the flies as much a nuisance as they had ever been, but Cheall reckoned that by the beginning of July none of them had ever been fitter.

Not far away at another camp at El Shatt was their sister battalion, the 1st Green Howards. Unlike the 6th Battalion, the 1st had yet to see action, having spent the war so far training in England, Northern Ireland and, more recently, Palestine. The 1st Battalion would be part of 5th ‘Yorkshire’ Division, which was appropriate enough since the Green Howards hailed from that county of northern England, and were originally named after the landowner who had been the regiment’s colonel back in the eighteenth century.

One of the officers, the commander of B Company, was quite a sporting celebrity. Major Hedley Verity was one of the finest spin bowlers ever to play cricket for Yorkshire and England, and in 1934 had taken fifteen wickets in England’s biggest ever victory over Australia. Verity had considered joining up in 1938 during the Munich crisis, but Arnold Shaw, the colonel of the Green Howards and an old friend, suggested he first read some military textbooks and advised him to get in touch again should war break out. That winter, Verity had read voraciously during the England tour of South Africa before returning home for the final season before the war. Yorkshire once again won the championship that summer with Verity cleaning up Sussex, taking six wickets for 15 runs on Friday 1 September, the day Germany invaded Poland. On the Saturday, he travelled back to Yorkshire with the rest of the team, on Sunday Britain declared war, and on Monday Verity got back in touch with Colonel Shaw and joined up.

Quiet, unassuming and always generous towards others, he quickly showed a natural aptitude for military tactics. The best spin bowlers have both sharp intelligence and a tactical mind, and Verity brought these skills to soldiering. Unsurprisingly, his men and his peers all adored him, while in between training sessions he never tired of playing morale-boosting games of cricket. Since his arrival in the Canal Zone there had even been a match in which Lieutenant-General Miles Dempsey, commander of XIII Corps, had played. A keen cricketer since his schooldays, Dempsey had been as overawed as most others to have the celebrated England player among his men. The chance to face the bowling of this sporting star had been too good to pass over.

Not all British troops scheduled for Operation HUSKY, as the Sicily invasion was code-named, were in the Middle East. Some had been training in northern Tunisia, including much of Major-General Vyvyan Evelegh’s 78th ‘Battleaxe’ Division, which was not to be part of the first wave of invasion troops but was to be kept in reserve, most likely landing a week or two later. Major Peter Pettit was second-in-command of the 17th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, a lawyer from London who had joined the part-time ranks of the Honourable Artillery Company as a nineteen-year-old. During his twelve years of pre-war service with the HAC, he’d taken his soldiering seriously and had risen to acting major, and in March 1941 he had transferred out of the territorials and into the regular army by joining the 17th Field Artillery. A further eighteen months had been spent in England training until finally he and the regiment were posted overseas to Tunisia, where they’d been fighting with First Army in the north of the country since the previous November. The 17th had performed well in North Africa, but Pettit, now aged thirty-four, was not a man to sit on any laurels and took the business of being a gunner very seriously. Aware how vital the artillery had become in the British way of war, he thought deeply and carefully about how it could best support the infantry and armour, writing down his thoughts about the relative values of different types of barrages and fire support patterns, and ensuring there had been no let-up in training. ‘Training from 0600 to 1200,’ he wrote in his diary on 3 June, ‘and training from 1700 to 1900.’3 In his next entry, he jotted: ‘Gun drill for four hours, very hot.’4 Joint exercises were held with the Irish Brigade, one of three infantry brigades in the 78th. Combined all-arms training was vital because invariably infantry would be advancing with fire support from the gunners; and the more training there was, the more officers such as Major Pettit got to know their fellows in the infantry, all of which helped enormously when doing it for real.

While it was the infantry – and armour – who had to make the leap of faith and advance across ground if the enemy was to be overrun and beaten, both the British and the Americans put increasing weight on fire-power to bludgeon the enemy – and on the ground, at any rate, it was the artillery who could provide that support. Fire plans, barrages, counter-battery fire, the siting of forward observers – all required enormous skill and training, and since the 17th FA was the senior artillery regiment in 78th Division, Peter Pettit, for one, was determined his men should be up to the job. Very often, a skilfully executed fire plan could be the difference between living and dying for the infantry up ahead of them.

On 1 July, General Montgomery, commanding Eighth Army to which they were now attached, came to visit the officers of the division, assembled under a large canopy of old car hoods put together by the engineers, just a hundred yards from the sea. ‘He said he planned on three principles,’ wrote Pettit, ‘that he would not move until he was ready, that objectives would be limited, and that he would not ask formations to do something they could not do.’5 Having been part of First Army in Tunisia, they’d not fought under Monty before, so this was their first proper sighting of their commanding general. Earlier, Montgomery had driven up to the men in the regiment and asked them to gather round. This had prompted something of a stampede, but Pettit knew the men had loved it, seeing this famous general – now their general – right there, in front of them, happily answering questions. ‘He got right under their skins at once,’ Pettit later jotted in his diary.6

Meanwhile, at the coastal port of Oran in Algeria the US 1st Infantry Division had also been gearing up for this next phase of the war against Nazi Germany and its Italian ally. The men of the Big Red One – as the 1st Division was known – had been part of the initial TORCH landings at Oran and Arzew the previous November and had spent the most time in the line during the Tunisian campaign: 112 out of 132 days, which was a lot more than any other American troops. Second Lieutenant Franklyn A. Johnson had celebrated victory in North Africa with three days sleeping and loafing in Bizerte, but then the division had been transferred back to Algeria, and to a training camp at Mangin, 12 miles from the city of Oran. An officer in Cannon Company of the 18th Infantry Regiment, Johnson had survived the North African campaign with no further damage than a painful but not serious shrapnel wound to his hand, but he was tired after the long campaign and in need of some R&R. They all were; and, recognizing this, the divisional commander, Major-General Terry de la Mesa Allen, had announced a brief moratorium on training, plus unrestricted passes and trucks to take his boys into town.

Inevitably, after such a sudden release of steam, drunken mayhem had followed. The next morning, General Allen himself had gone down to the city’s jails and bailed out the many men who had been locked up for over-exuberance the previous evening. The episode had cost Allen a severe dressing-down from Lieutenant-General George S. Patton, the commander of Force 343 for the upcoming invasion – what would soon become the US Seventh Army. Patton disapproved of his soldiers going on drunken sprees, and even more strongly of commanders encouraging such behaviour.

Frank Johnson had been among those assembled for a pep-talk by Allen a day or so later, by which time the holiday period was over and training had resumed. No mention was made of the drunken revelry in Oran. Instead, Allen had praised them all for their work in Tunisia, highlighting the GIs – the rank and file – above any of the officers. ‘Do your job,’ he finished. ‘We don’t want heroes – dead heroes. We’re not out for glory – we’re here to do a dirty, stinking job.’ It went down well. ‘We love and respect Terry Allen even more after he talks frankly to us at Mangin,’ noted Johnson.7

Johnson was from New Jersey, the son of a professor of Military Science and Tactics at Hamilton College, New York. With poor eyesight, he’d known he would not get a regular army commission, but at Rutgers University had joined the ROTC – Reserve Officer Training Corps – graduating in May 1942 and heading off to join the army for the duration immediately after. He had shipped to England in September and been posted to Cannon Company of the 18th Infantry Regiment, arriving in Algeria in November, just behind the invasion. More training had followed, and then they’d been sent into Tunisia to help stem the flow at Kasserine in February 1943, when the US II Corps had suffered a severe setback at the hands of a briefly resurgent Feldmarschall Erwin Rommel and his Panzerarmee. Johnson and the rest of the 18th Infantry had been in the thick of it throughout the rest of the fighting.

The cannon company attached to each infantry regiment provided a mixture of fire support – a platoon of tracked 105mm howitzers on a Sherman tank chassis known as a Priest, 75mm guns mounted on half-tracks, and anti-tank guns. Johnson commanded an anti-tank platoon and was very relieved to be giving up the 37mm pea-shooters with which they’d fought through Tunisia and getting his hands instead on the new 57mm, a gun of greater velocity and far superior range that packed a considerably bigger punch – essentially a British 6-pounder in all but name. At last, Johnson and his men had realized, they would be able actually to disable a German tank. That was quite something.

They had been working hard that June, training for village infiltration, firing upon towed targets and conducting invasion exercises. At one such landing exercise, General Patton had turned up to watch. Many of the men in the Big Red One thought little of Patton; he was too spick and span, insisting on the wearing of ties at all times and on being clean-shaven. They also suspected he was a glory hunter – and that he wasn’t known as ‘Old Blood and Guts’ for nothing. Patton’s approach to the military – that it was his life’s mission and that appearances counted for everything – stood in sharp contrast to that of General Terry Allen and his Executive Officer, Brigadier-General Teddy Roosevelt, son and namesake of the former president, who were decidedly more laissez-faire over such matters. Allen’s and Roosevelt’s approach inevitably flowed downwards to the men. It also put Allen on a collision course with Patton, who had originally planned to leave the 1st Infantry Division out of the HUSKY order of battle. But the Big Red One was now comfortably his most experienced division in a force startlingly lacking in that most precious commodity. He needed them.

Johnson and his men had heard the sirens screaming before they’d seen Patton’s cavalcade arrive. Then suddenly there he was, stepping out and inspecting them as they were hastily brought to attention. Johnson couldn’t help but be impressed by the general’s appearance: shiny leather boots and spurs, pink breeches, silver buckled belt and shellacked and star-studded helmet. ‘After the aide signals that the inspection is over,’ noted Johnson, ‘we return to our work as someone mumbles.8 “Yeah, your guts and our blood.”’

The Tunisian campaign had ended on 13 May, when the German General Jürgen von Arnim had surrendered all German and Italian forces – two entire armies, amounting to more than 250,000 men – on the Cap Bon peninsula, the north-eastern tip of Tunisia. Later that day, the Allied ground forces commander, General Sir Harold Alexander, commander-in-chief of 18th Army Group, had signalled to the British prime minister. ‘Sir, it is my duty to report that the Tunisian campaign is over,’ he wrote.9 ‘All enemy resistance has ceased. We are masters of the North African shores.’

That North Africa was now teeming with American, British and Commonwealth troops seemed, on one level, rather bizarre; after all, it was a long way from Berlin, or France, or any other part of Nazi-occupied Europe. They were there, though, owing to a long and convoluted chain of events, whose origins could be charted back to June 1940. On the 10th of that month, when the French were staring down the barrel of defeat at the hands of the Germans and most of the British Expeditionary Force had already been evacuated back to Britain from Dunkirk, Benito Mussolini, the Fascist dictator of Italy, had declared war on both countries. It had been a massive gamble as his armed forces were underdeveloped, for the most part poorly equipped by modern standards and severely undertrained. Even the Italian navy, which was its most up-to-date component, lacked any aircraft carriers or any form of radar. Mussolini had gambled on both France and Britain being knocked out of the war, thereby giving him essentially a free hand in dramatically expanding his sphere of dominance in the Mediterranean and Africa. Libya and Abyssinia were already Italian colonies; next on the list were Malta, Egypt and Sudan – and the crucial Suez Canal, which would link them all neatly together. Also in his sights were Greece and the eastern Mediterranean.

Few of his senior commanders shared his enthusiasm, however – especially when it became clear that Britain had no intention of throwing in the towel. In early July, the Royal Navy sank much of the Vichy and Axis-backing French fleet at Mers el-Kebir in Algeria – hardly the action of a country soon to sue for peace. Then, in July, the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet had clashed with the Italian navy, the Regia Marina, at the Battle of Calabria and had given the Italians a brutal taste of superior British seamanship. Even the tiny Mediterranean outpost of Malta, an island lying just 60 miles south of Sicily, had resisted Italian bombing and had been hurriedly reinforced by the British. All this had not augured well for Mussolini’s ambitions.

By September 1940, with the RAF still successfully fending off all subjugation attempts by the Luftwaffe over southern England, men like Maresciallo Rodolfo Graziani, commander of the Italian Tenth Army in Libya, had begun to see the writing on the wall all too clearly. Land grabs in North Africa and the Mediterranean were one thing if the British were out of the war, but quite another if they were still fighting. It was reluctantly, and only under extreme pressure from Mussolini, that he advanced his men into Egypt on 13 September 1940; and then, having gone a few short miles, he stopped.

Already, Mussolini’s plans were starting to unravel. In Germany, he had a bullying dominant ally with a raft of victories already under its belt, while his own generals appeared to lack any fire at all; and all the while, the British, whom he had supposed to be dead and buried, were getting stronger, not weaker. Mussolini had wanted a parallel war where the Germans kept off his patch and where Italian victories would be ludicrously easy; one that would make him and Italy look militarily strong and the leading world player he believed it was Fascist Italy’s destiny to be.

By the end of that year such dreams had been completely dashed. The invasion of Greece at the end of October 1940 had quickly turned into a catastrophe as the Greeks unexpectedly resisted invasion and then fought back, while in December the British launched Operation COMPASS with its tiny Western Desert Force of 36,000 men. By February 1941, two Italian armies had been smashed, some 133,000 men taken prisoner and the remainder pushed back almost to Tripoli. Meanwhile, the British had also attacked through Sudan into Abyssinia and Eritrea, and by May had hammered the Italians there as well.

At this time, Britain’s priority was keeping open the Atlantic sea-lanes and defeating the U-boat threat. From one perspective, North Africa and the Mediterranean theatre held little strategic importance for Britain, given that the Mediterranean – and hence the Suez Canal – as a shipping channel and short cut to India and beyond was already closed because Axis forces controlled the northern shores. Nor was Middle East oil especially important to Britain, because the world’s leading oil producers at this time were America and Venezuela, and they were the sources of almost all Britain’s domestic oil; Middle East oil supplied British Middle East operations and nothing more.

Rather, Britain’s strategy in the Middle East and Mediterranean was largely opportunistic. This was a part of the world where Britain could easily concentrate the assets of the Dominions and the rest of the Empire – whether manpower or supplies – from India, Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. It offered a chance to defeat Italy, make it a liability for Germany and expose the Reich’s southern flank, from which future operations might then open up. It was also the perfect testing ground for a British Army that needed to grow and develop rapidly following the fall of its ally, France, and the losses suffered on the continent. Britain also hoped to create an eastern Mediterranean bloc with Turkey, Greece and Yugoslavia, from which British and Commonwealth troops could also push into Vichy French Syria and influence Franco’s Spain.

It was precisely for reasons of southern flank vulnerability that Hitler felt compelled to come to the rescue of his Italian ally. Generalmajor Erwin Rommel, one of the stars of the 1940 campaign in the West, was sent to Libya with two divisions, followed soon after by a third, while German troops swept into Yugoslavia, then mainland Greece, and then took Crete as well. This forced the British to siphon off troops from North Africa to support a failed cause in Greece and Crete, but in the long term the battles in the Balkans cost the Germans more, even though they won the day and sent the British scuttling back to the Middle East. This was because they took place immediately before the largest clash of arms the world had ever witnessed: Operation BARBAROSSA, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Germany had needed the dissipation of resources caused by being sucked into the Mediterranean like a bolt in the head. The diversion of even a handful of panzer divisions and the loss of vital transport aircraft and highly trained and motivated troops was keenly felt as, by late 1941, the German advance into Russia began to run out of steam. The aim of BARBAROSSA had been to annihilate the Soviet Red Army in a matter of three months at most, then feed off the booty gained. Instead, by the end of 1941, Germany had been sucked into an attritional and brutal campaign on the Eastern Front that was draining off ever more men and materiel, while at the same time pursuing a campaign in the Mediterranean that it could ill afford. Few in Germany had forgotten that fighting on two fronts for much of the First World War had done for them in that last major conflict.

Since there was absolutely no realistic chance of Britain invading Nazi-occupied Europe any time soon, and because they were now embroiled in North Africa and the Middle East, the British were compelled to keep fighting there until the bitter end. From June 1941 until the beginning of November 1942, the fighting raged across Libya, back and forth depending on the respective fortunes of the warring parties elsewhere. As a rough rule of thumb, when the Luftwaffe was on Sicily and pounding Malta, Axis fortunes in North Africa improved. When the Luftwaffe was needed elsewhere, however, as in the second half of 1941, then the British moved into the ascendancy, because Malta-based submarines, warships and aircraft were able to hammer Axis shipping convoys across the Mediterranean largely unchecked. When the Luftwaffe returned to Sicily en masse in the first half of 1942, Malta briefly became the most bombed place in the world. There had been discussions then about an Axis invasion of Malta, but it was eventually accepted that Rommel should push ahead with an offensive in Libya. Since that meant the Luftwaffe would be needed for support, most of Fliegerkorps II was transferred from Sicily to North Africa. At this point, Malta had been on its knees; but the easing of pressure and the arrival of more Spitfires allowed the island to get back on its feet. In North Africa, meanwhile, Rommel struck the British lines in late May 1942 and won a famous victory, with the garrison of Tobruk surrendering on 21 June and the British Eighth Army fleeing back to the Alamein Line, a mere 60 miles to the west of Alexandria in Egypt. For a brief moment, it looked as though Rommel’s Panzerarmee Afrika might actually conquer all Egypt and push on into the Middle East.

There were a number of reasons why he was unable to do so. On Malta, the RAF managed to win back air superiority in short order. Then, when the most heavily defended Allied convoy of the war inched into Malta in mid-August, it threw the starving island a lifeline and the chance to bounce back swiftly. By this time, Rommel’s men had hit a brick wall at the Alamein Line and couldn’t burst through to snatch the final furlong to Cairo, Alexandria and the Suez Canal. To make matters worse, Axis supply lines were hideously long – the only decent-sized port available was Tripoli, over 1,000 miles away – which meant that half the available fuel was used up transporting it to the front, while British supply lines had shrunk dramatically and very advantageously. At the end of August, Malta-based aircraft sank six vital Axis tankers headed for North Africa, the Battle of Alam Halfa was lost, and the Panzerarmee Afrika was now on the back foot, while a reinvigorated Eighth Army was able to build up enough strength to ensure it never lost in North Africa again.

As this Mediterranean see-saw rocked back and forth, the United States had formally entered the war on 7 December 1941 following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In fact, America had tied its colours to the Allied mast far earlier, with senior men sent to London back in 1940 to observe the Battle of Britain and on 27 March the following year agreeing, in principle, that should the United States become embroiled in the war at some future point, defeating Germany would be the priority. This was reaffirmed at the Atlantic Meeting between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill in August that year and swiftly confirmed during the ARCADIA conference in Washington between the American and British chiefs of staff – the first formal Allied conference, following swiftly on the heels of Pearl Harbor.

America had also been involved in the war materially long before the Japanese attack. Following the defeat of France, Roosevelt, who had won presidential terms in 1932 and 1936 on an isolationist ticket, had decided not only that he would stand for a historic third term in November 1940, but also that the Atlantic was no longer the barrier it had once been. His conundrum was how to successfully rearm on a massive scale while public opinion remained strongly against any involvement in European matters. Somehow, he had to pull off not only one of the biggest ever political voltes-face, but also win a third term – something no previous president had ever attempted.

In the event, he did both – by a combination of guile and political cunning, superb public relations and, perhaps most importantly, his superlative geopolitical understanding and clear vision of what needed to be done. Drawing around him a number of highly skilled technocrats and big businessmen as ‘advisors’, he began the process of kick-starting rearmament, using the argument that the best way to keep American boys out of the war was to help America’s friends to use their young men to keep the wolves from the door themselves. By rearming, they could not only achieve this but help pull their economy out of the continuing effects of the Great Depression at the same time. Even better, a decent chunk of the cash to fund this initial push to rearm was coming from British coffers.

It is sometimes hard to grasp just how much the United States armed forces had been allowed to languish in the twenties and thirties. By 1935, the army had fallen to just under 119,000 men and even by September 1939 it stood at merely 188,000, which made it the nineteenth largest in the world, sandwiched between those of Portugal and Uruguay. Most units were operating at half-strength, and much of its equipment was obsolescent. Even by May 1940, there were just 160 fighter planes and 52 heavy bombers in the entire US Army Air Corps; only the navy had been kept up to date and given much investment. Back in 1918, the States had been the leading supplier in the world of TNT; by 1940 there were barely any manufacturers of explosives left in the country. So by the time Roosevelt pressed the ‘go’ button on rearming, the army and what would become the US Army Air Forces effectively had to start again from scratch. As a result, on 16 May 1940, Roosevelt asked for a defence budget increase not to $24 million, as had been originally mooted, but rather to $1.2 billion. The aim was to produce 50,000 aircraft a year and to have an army of 4 million by 1 April 1942.

This was rearming on an exponential scale and involved harnessing much of the United States’ already advanced consumer industry – and, not least, making the most of its extensive automobile industry, cheap labour and isolated position, which meant there would be no threat of air raids or need for night-time curfews. Once America began producing armaments, it would be able, in theory, to keep on producing them, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Even so, as Roosevelt was warned, this huge transformation could not happen overnight; it would take some six months or so to create the new machine tools needed for this huge manufacturing programme, then another six months to train up the workers and get the show on the road, and a further six months before the production lines would start to churn out materiel in meaningful numbers. That was eighteen months, which conveniently took America to the end of 1941 – precisely the time when the States formally entered the war. It is often assumed that by Pearl Harbor the United States had seamlessly emerged, fully formed, as the ‘arsenal of democracy’; in fact, it was a fraught and dramatic process, and even though few in the summer of 1940 would have doubted America’s armaments manufacturing potential, there had been a big difference between what might be possible and what was actually achievable.

None the less, the miracle was happening. Ships, tanks, guns, bombers and fighter aircraft were all starting to roll off the production lines, while the rapidly growing US Army, the result of the country’s first peacetime draft, was emerging from camps all around the country and being put through vital training exercises – not just for the men but for the entire modus operandi of the army – at a series of large-scale manoeuvres in Louisiana in the late summer of 1941. Meanwhile, the US Atlantic Fleet had begun to play its part, helping escort British convoys across the ocean from early September 1941, and with orders to destroy any Axis vessel found in American waters or threatening its personnel or cargo. As it happened, the first US–German clash of arms happened the other way around, when a U-boat in the Atlantic sank an American destroyer, the Reuben James, in October 1941.

Although this caused public outrage in the States, Roosevelt continued to hold off entering the war until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and even then it was Germany that declared war on America, not the other way around. Once in the fight, however, Roosevelt and his military chiefs had been quick to express their desire to get into battle as soon as possible. Britain, lying off the European continent, was the obvious place to build up American forces with a view to launching a cross-Channel invasion later that year, 1942. The British, mustard keen to get the Americans ensnared in the fight against Nazi Germany right away, readily agreed, even though they knew perfectly well there was not the slightest chance either they or the United States would be ready for such an undertaking so soon. The following year, 1943, seemed a more reasonable bet.

Matters came swiftly to a head in the early summer of 1942 when Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, visited first London and then Washington in an effort to secure greater materiel support from the western Allies and also secure a pledge from them to launch a new front against Germany. It was clear the Germans were planning a renewed offensive on the Eastern Front, and Molotov stressed the Soviet Union urgently needed the Allies to draw off German troops as soon as possible. In London, Churchill told him that opening a second front in Europe simply would not be possible that year.

With this bombshell, Molotov travelled on to Washington. In the meantime, Churchill had reported the substance of his conversations to Roosevelt and reminded him of a suggestion he’d made the previous October: a joint Anglo-US invasion of Vichy French north-west Africa. This, he argued, would kill two birds, if not three, with one stone. It would speed up the conquest of North Africa and clear the southern Mediterranean; it might well hustle Italy out of the war; and it would give British and US forces a chance to operate together in an enterprise where victory was likely. As such, it could be a very useful test run for the cross-Channel invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe to which they had both pledged their commitment. In Washington, meanwhile, Molotov repeated the requests he’d made to the British – and this time, Roosevelt and General George Marshall, the US chief of staff, both confirmed that, yes, they would start a second front against Germany that year, 1942.

By this time, US men and materiel had begun arriving in Britain – the first troops, from the 34th ‘Red Bull’ Division, had reached the UK on 24 January 1942. To begin with, their training and organization were somewhat lackadaisical, to say the least, and Major-General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a protégé of General Marshall, was packed off to England to see US build-up preparations for himself. Returning with a fairly damning report, he unwittingly wrote himself into a job and was sent back to Britain as Commanding General, European Theater of Operations, with Major-General Mark W. Clark, another up-and-coming star, as his deputy.

In the summer of 1942, Eisenhower was still only a two-star general, but he had already shown plenty of signs of his remarkable talents. His upbringing could scarcely have been more humble. Born in Texas, he had been raised from an early age in the tiny rail halt town of Abilene, Kansas, in America’s Midwest. Both studious and athletic, he had worked hard, won a place at West Point, the US Army Military Academy, and slowly but surely risen up the ranks by dint of hard work, a meticulous eye for detail, a highly organized brain and no small amount of charm and graciousness. Unlike contemporaries such as Patton or Mark Clark, he had not made it to the Western Front in the last war and had, by 1942, yet to command troops in battle, but had instead shown early promise as a highly competent staff officer.

After a stint serving with General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines, he had returned to Washington and caught the eye of General George Marshall, who in September 1939 had become the Chief of Staff, the United States’ most senior serviceman. Eisenhower had won further good notices for his part in organizing the Louisiana Maneuvers in 1941, the largest exercises of their kind up to that point, so that once America was in the war, he was an obvious candidate for higher command.

Eisenhower and Clark had reached London still believing their brief was to mount Operation SLEDGEHAMMER. This was to be a cross-Channel invasion of France, to capture a key port, establish a bridgehead and then use it to break out with a bigger operation – ROUNDUP – in 1943. Yet it soon became clear to them that, despite promises to Molotov from Roosevelt and Marshall, the British had no intention of attempting such an undertaking. That there were still two entirely different strategic agendas as late as July 1942 underlined the gulf between the British and the Americans, who – though widely referred to as ‘the Allies’ – were at this point still only coalition partners rather than bound by a formal alliance. Both Britain’s and America’s war leaders had to feel their way into this new relationship. And, for all the Americans’ gung-ho enthusiasm to strike swiftly at the heart of the Reich, there was no doubt the British had a point. There was a lack of shipping, they argued, and also a shortage of landing craft – new vessels were being built but there were not yet enough. What’s more, no American troops had ever fought against a German panzer division, and many US infantrymen had not even seen a tank yet, let alone trained with one. Failure would have a disastrous knock-on effect for ROUNDUP the following year.

By mid-July, SLEDGEHAMMER had been scrapped; but the promise made to Molotov hung over the Americans, and so Churchill once again raised the prospect of a joint Anglo-US invasion of French north-west Africa. On 24 July, with Roosevelt’s approval, this was agreed in principle: it meant the Americans could keep their promise to the Soviets, the operation would not need as many landing craft or warships as a cross-Channel invasion, and it could, as Churchill had earlier suggested, give the new coalition partners a fairly safe opportunity to test the water of joint operations. An overall Allied commander would be needed for the entire operation, and General Alan Brooke, the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff, suggested it should be an American. The Brits also proposed that the landing operations in Algiers and French Morocco should be led by US troops, partly as an additional sop to the Americans and partly because Vichy French antipathy to Britain was still very strong after the sinking of the French fleet at Mers el-Kebir back in July 1940. This was all agreed, and so the new operation, codenamed TORCH, was now on. Eisenhower became the natural choice for overall commander, and was duly appointed with a promotion to lieutenant-general. Planning was carried out from Eisenhower’s headquarters in London and with a joint Anglo-US planning team getting down to the nitty-gritty.

As a first foray into mounting such operations, TORCH certainly ticked the boxes outlined by Churchill when he first suggested it, and it was agreed it would take place on 8 November 1942, as a second punch following Eighth Army’s main attack on the Panzerarmee Afrika at Alamein on 23 October. By this time, General Bernard Montgomery, who had taken over command of Eighth Army in early August, had built up overwhelming strength, although the battle still turned out to be a bloody and attritional affair. None the less, by 3 November it was all over, Rommel’s forces fleeing back across the desert with the British in pursuit, and this time for good.

Superb planning, led by General Mark Clark, ensured that TORCH was a success. Clark himself had made a clandestine visit to North Africa for pre-invasion talks with the Vichy French, which had gone some way to ensuring the opposition to the landings was extremely light. Even so, it was no small feat to land three separate invasion forces, two from Britain and one directly from the United States, pretty much on time and pretty much where they were supposed to after just two months’ planning. Having subdued the Vichy French, who sued for terms within four days of the invasion, the plan was to make straight for Tunisia: the British First Army, which included the US II Corps, would drive in from Algeria in the west, while Eighth Army, from the east, sped as quickly as possible across Libya to trap Rommel’s forces in a pincer movement.

After the success of the TORCH landings and the victory at Alamein, however, the Allies had not found the going in North Africa quite as good as they’d hoped. Northern Tunisia was, in places, further north than Sicily, it was not the flat open desert of Libya, and by late November 1942 winter had arrived and bad weather began to slow down the advance of the British First Army.

The second spanner in the works was Hitler’s decision to send massive reinforcements to Tunisia. As soon as the Führer heard about the Allied invasion, he ordered the total occupation of France – much of the south had remained unoccupied since the armistice back in June 1940 – and told the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the German general staff, that a bridgehead was to be created around Tunis. There were those who suggested to Hitler that this wasn’t the best idea, but he was having none of it. He had always been obsessed with the Mediterranean, because of the threat from the Allies striking the soft underbelly of his southern flank, which was why he’d insisted on earlier interventions in North Africa, the Balkans, Greece and Crete.

Of all the places on the long North African coastline, Tunisia was the closest to Sicily – and Europe – and so the easiest for German troops to reinforce. Hitler hoped to avoid any Italian collapse, and saw the build-up of men and supplies there as the means of keeping the southern flank secure. It was to be held at all costs. The Luftwaffe was sent south once more, as too were panzer divisions, some even equipped with the new giant Panzer Mk VI, better known as the Tiger.

This build-up of troops had enabled the Axis forces to check the advance of the British and Americans racing to Tunis, while it had taken time for Eighth Army and the RAF to shift themselves 1,200 miles west. In January 1943, Churchill, Roosevelt and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had met at Casablanca for a strategy conference. By this time, Rommel had around 80,000 men in his Panzerarmee Afrika, while General Jürgen von Arnim’s 5. Panzerarmee now amounted to some 65,000 – and growing – in northern Tunisia. Eisenhower actually offered to resign over this setback, but Marshall, Brooke and the chiefs of staff recognized that he was now carrying too much responsibility. Instead, he was made Supreme Allied Commander, which allowed him to concentrate on political and wider operational issues, and a new deputy and overall field commander was brought in under him. This was General Sir Harold Alexander.

On 21 January, Eighth Army took Tripoli, and while Montgomery waited for the rest of his forces to catch up, Rommel took the opportunity to sweep into southern Tunisia, where he attacked with his old dash and flair on St Valentine’s Day 1943, his panzers smashing into the unprepared and still green US II Corps in what became the ten-day Battle of the Kasserine Pass. The US 1st Armored Division, with losses of some 1,400, was hardest hit, but overall the Allied casualties at Kasserine had been serious rather than disastrous, and the American defeat was not really the catastrophe that is so often depicted – more a short-term tactical gain for the Axis forces than a victory of much strategic value. It had shocked the Americans, none the less; but for troops new to battle, sometimes there is more to be learned from defeat than victory, and that was certainly the case in this instance.

In any case, the reverse at Kasserine was checked in fairly quick order, leaving Rommel’s Panzerarmee in the south once again overextended and needing urgently to turn back to face Eighth Army’s advance from Libya. In March, the Allies fought back. Eighth Army pushed the Panzerarmee Afrika back at Medenine in southern Tunisia, after which Rommel, now sick and exhausted, left Africa for good, handing over command of his forces, now increasingly made up from Italian units, to Generale Giovanni Messe. Eighth Army then attacked the strong defensive Mareth Line between the coast and the Matmata Hills, while the New Zealand Corps outflanked the position by making a 200-mile trek around the back of the mountains. By the beginning of April, Eighth Army had turned north; while they were briefly halted by the Italians at Wadi Akarit, II Corps and the rest of First Army advanced from the north and west against von Arnim’s 5. Panzerarmee. The Allies were closing in, the Axis bridgehead becoming ever smaller. The final offensive, in the Medjerda valley west of Tunis, was possibly the best-executed battle the Allies had yet launched, smashing the last resistance and ensuring that by 13 May victory had, at last, been secured in North Africa.

While all this had been going on, the Allies were busy planning their next move: the invasion of Sicily and the first assault on Fortress Europe, an operation of mind-boggling complexity and one that presented what had first appeared to be insuperable challenges.