Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (38 page)

Still, many lessons
were
learned from the debacle at Dieppe. Intelligence preparations were inadequate, and it seems that Mountbatten and his staff had pushed ahead with their intentions without the Joint Intelligence Committee knowing about them. How could the planners
not know that a German coastal convoy would be in the same waters that night, or that German forces along the coasts had been put on high alert, with additional machine gun battalions recently brought in to Dieppe itself ? The strength of the German defenses was not properly measured, nor the nature of the terrain appreciated—how exactly would one get a heavy Churchill tank up a steep pebble beach, and even if the vehicles managed to crest such a rise, how would one get them past solid antitank walls without special equipment? Ship-to-shore movements were clumsy, and few if any of the Canadian commanders had amphibious warfare experience. Landings were late, sometimes in the wrong place. There was no control from offshore, because there was no command ship. Daytime aerial support was inadequate because the RAF did not have full command of the air. There was no preceding heavy bombing by Bomber Command, nor provision made for tactical air strikes. The strength of the naval bombardment was completely inadequate; if 15-inch battleship guns could not make much impact at Gallipoli, why should 4-inch destroyer guns do so off Dieppe? Above all, there was the chief blunder: making the main attack against a heavily held harbor rather than on some less protected part of the coast. If the Allied planners wanted to test the possibilities of seizing a defended port, at Dieppe they got their answer.

But there was something else about the value of the Dieppe experiment that was larger and rather more nuanced, more of a psychological lesson. The second front, whenever it came, was definitely going to take place along the Atlantic-swept waters of France
and
against well-trained German troops. That was a combination of challenges that really had to be tested. If the results of the raid confirmed all of Alanbrooke’s worries—and supplied him and Churchill with the ammunition to argue for postponing Operation Overlord through 1943 and into 1944—it also presented the Anglo-American planners with a new and much higher benchmark. When, eventually, they did come ashore in France to pursue a full invasion, they were going to have to be very, very good.

That was so, of course, for one further worrying reason. Although well emplaced, the German garrison in and around Dieppe was actually not very large. The 571st German Infantry Division had around 1,500 men in the area, but only 150 of them were there to pour fire onto the
main beaches; yet that, with the defensive works, turned out to be enough (again, one thinks of Cartagena de Indias in 1741). The Atlantic Wall would never again be so minimally held, and the next two years would see more and more German divisions moved to that front and fantastically more obstacles, pillboxes, and minefields put in place. In sum, each side could learn much from what had really been a small-scale operation at Dieppe.

That term certainly could not describe the Operation Torch landings in North Africa in November 1942, although the chronological proximity of the two operations is useful in allowing us to pinpoint the differences between them. Operation Torch was an amphibious invasion, not a raid, and it was very large. Although initial Allied planning had called for even more extensive operations, the troops landed with the purpose of capturing Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers totaled close to 75,000 in the first stage, with many more to come. It was also an Anglo-American venture, and the first of its kind in the war. It was not only combined, then (as between three armed services), but joint (as between the two Western Allies). Here was another reason it had to work: could two rather different military cultures, in the heat of battle, avoid the almost inevitable frictions of alliance politics and different organizational and training systems, different weaponry, and different control systems?

That it did so was because Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff had been hammering out the principles of Allied jointness since at least their August 1941 meeting off Argentia Bay, Newfoundland, and the prime minister’s rushed visit to Washington that same Christmas. Some generals and admirals accepted the sinking of differences and sharing of roles better than others—Eisenhower and Tedder were quite superb in this, both having heroic amounts of patience—but mutual necessity forced the pace. Both partners could see that in places where they would fight a campaign together (Southeast Asia, the Mediterranean, northwest Europe), they should accept the principle of the theater commander in chief coming from one combatant, the deputy commander from another. Therefore, given that the overwhelming bulk of the Operation Torch invasion troops would be American (partly because the British Army was just completing the El Alamein battle at the other end of North Africa, partly to avoid antagonizing
the Vichy French forces bitter at earlier British attacks), the overall command went to Eisenhower, with Admiral Andrew Cunningham becoming deputy commander as well as being named the overall Allied naval commander. The naval and air force jointness was something of a formality here, though, since the American units operated along the Atlantic landing areas, and the British inside the Mediterranean. Headquarters for Eisenhower was, appropriately enough, Gibraltar, which had fulfilled that key strategic role for well over two hundred years.
¹⁹

Another main difference with Dieppe was the extreme distances that the Allied invasion forces had to cover. The U.S. forces for the landings in Morocco sailed from a variety of East Coast ports directly across the central Atlantic in time for the November 8 coordinated landings. The British and American troops headed for Oran and Algiers sailed a few days later from the Clyde.
^b
The heavy covering squadron Force H, whose task it was to neutralize any attacks by either the Vichy French or the Italian fleets, had left earlier from Scapa Flow, so as to pose a massive presence in the western Mediterranean. Fast squadrons, slow squadrons, refueling squadrons, merchant ships, landing ships, tugs, colliers, advance submarine patrols—all had to be in the right place at the right time. No wonder Eisenhower was nervous.

There was much, much more to be accomplished in the logistics of a large amphibious operation than simply sending five hundred different ships to sea, but the most important thing to note is that these modern invading armies not only required naval and merchant navy support for their original landing but also needed a constant and expanding supply of seaborne provender as the land campaigns unfolded. Given the crisis in Allied shipping by the beginning of 1943, the farther the Anglo-American forces in North Africa advanced—and the more that the stubborn German defense under Rommel and von Arnim held out—the greater became the need to divert merchantmen to the Mediterranean
from the key Atlantic convoys to the British Isles and the slower became the buildup for the invasion of France, quite apart from the critical task of feeding the British people.
²⁰
Throughout the middle years of the war, shortages of shipping and of landing craft were probably the single greatest determinants of the pace of the Allied amphibious campaigns.

Because of the importance of getting Operation Torch right, the Allies took both naval bombardment and command of the air very seriously indeed. There was the faint possibility that the sizable Italian navy might put to sea out of southern harbors such as Salerno and Taranto, and a somewhat higher chance that the French battle fleet at Toulon might come out to fight, which is why Force H stood on guard some distance from the actual landings. The American troops destined for the Moroccan coast were backed up by no fewer than three battleships, one fleet carrier, four escort carriers, seven cruisers, and thirty-eight destroyers. The Royal Navy’s total warship deployment inside the Mediterranean was even larger. Royal Navy submarines acted as offshore guides for the advancing landing forces and as distant protection across the Mediterranean. All told, four fleet carriers and five smaller carriers were deployed, which meant that they could dominate the skies until the first airfields were captured and Hurricane and Spitfire squadrons flown in from Gibraltar.

The landings themselves can be fairly easily summarized. Along the Atlantic (Moroccan) coastline, despite disruption by the rough surf, beachhead confusions, and a certain amount of French resistance, the approaches to Casablanca and then the city itself were secured by November 12, 1942. The greatest threat came from French destroyer strikes against the landing force, but they were overwhelmed by American cruisers while, further offshore, fire from the U.S. battleships pinned down the shore batteries. The attacks against Oran and Algiers were altogether more dramatic, chiefly because there was even more land, naval, and aerial resistance, and partly because the British tried to run warships into the harbors themselves in the hope of a swift knockout blow; a pair of Royal Navy warships was dispatched into each port and swiftly crushed. The amphibious landings on the dangerous beaches on each side of Algiers were thrown into great confusion, with units landing either on top of each other amid high waves or in entirely
the wrong place—errors that, Barnett observes, “would have been ruthlessly punished had this been a coast defended by German troops.”
²¹
Then French destroyers came out to fight but were pummeled by the fast, 6-inch-gunned British cruisers. Coastal batteries shot it out with HMS
Rodney,
and Dewoitine fighters tackled the Spitfires landing on the first captured airfields. In the background to this resistance the armistice negotiations came to a successful conclusion, and within three days Operation Torch had achieved its objective—follow-on reinforcements could now flow into Casablanca, Algiers, and Oran.

Some of the lessons learned from all this were at the critical lower level of combat, such as that the distant lobbing of battleships’ shells was pretty hopeless but close-in volleys against coastal batteries could be devastating; equally clearly, grabbing an airfield onshore as soon as possible produced a massive gain. The absolute necessity of a command ship was again confirmed. The Oran operation was smoothly supervised from the HQ ship
Largs
by a Royal Navy commodore, Thomas Hope Troubridge; the head of the U.S. Army forces, Major General Lloyd Fredendall; and the combined air forces commander, the irrepressible Jimmy Doolittle of the USAAF. Off Algiers, in the state-of-the-art HQ vessel
Bulolo,
Rear Admiral Harold M. Burrough of the Royal Navy, Major General Charles W. Ryder of the U.S. Army, and Air Commodore Vyvyan Evelegh of the RAF supervised their respective forces. Here, in two medium-sized vessels, was successful interservice and inter-Allied cooperation at the next level down from that of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. This was not the case off Casablanca, where no such independent HQ vessel existed for the American forces, which at one stage led to General Patton and his military staff being carried away from the landing area when the cruiser USS
Aurora
(in which they were located) turned to neutralize French destroyer attacks.

There were two larger lessons. The first was further strong confirmation that assaults from the sea upon or into enemy-held ports, in the age of quick-firing guns, mines, and torpedoes, were just a folly. On the other hand, the beach landings had all shown how difficult it was to place a large force of men on an open stretch of coastline against powerful tides, strong winds, poor visibility, and natural obstacles such as sandbanks. Unbreachable ports, or unlandable shingle and reefs? Yet if the waters and beaches of Oran were difficult enough, what would it be
like attempting a much greater operation onto the shores of northwest France, where the Atlantic rollers had a clear 3,000 miles of ocean to build up their power and funnel it through the Channel? The second major lesson—a continually nagging one for Allied planners—was that this had not been a defeat of German troops. Some Vichy units had battled valiantly, but the majority were clearly relieved when Admiral François Darlan decided upon a cease-fire, then a surrender. Hitler’s answer to Darlan’s defection was to order the occupation of Vichy France and then to pour German (and some Italian) divisions into Tunisia, where from November until May 1943 Rommel and his successor generals held off vastly greater Allied armies pressing them from west and east in a most impressive display of both defensive and counteroffensive warfare (see
chapter 3
). Despite this tough German resistance, Operation Torch had been relatively easy for the Allies, and a great relief.