He sided with Churchill. He ignored his military advisers.
As commander in chief of the United States during World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt seized the controls of America’s war-making apparatus more firmly than any president since Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War. FDR was not a military meddler in the mold of Winston Churchill, but he did make crucial strategic decisions, often at the prime minister’s behest. And by deciding to fight in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, Roosevelt overruled his own military commanders.
When a war ends in triumph, there is little inclination to question decisions made on the way to victory. Nevertheless, it is fair to ask what influenced FDR’s strategic choices and whether they hastened the war’s end—or delayed it. The fate of millions once hung on the answer.
In the spring of 1942, with the United States at war against Hitler yet fighting Germans nowhere, Roosevelt was impatient to engage the enemy. That June, Time magazine pointed out that six months after Pearl Harbor, the United States had “not taken a single inch of enemy territory, not yet beaten the enemy in a major battle on land, nor yet opened an offensive campaign.” To determine where and when to fight the Germans, Roosevelt depended primarily on his army chief of staff, General George C. Marshall. Marshall in turn relied on a smart, energetic workaholic, Brigadier General Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom he had dragged reluctantly into a Washington desk job—chief of the War Plans Division—after Pearl Harbor.
On January 27, 1942, Eisenhower wrote, “We must win in Europe,” in notes that he kept for himself. The Pacific, he judged, was “important, but not a vital area.” To Ike the only sensible strategy was to cross the English Channel, invade France, then drive through the relatively flat 550 miles from the French coast to Berlin. “It’s going to be a hell of a job,” he concluded, “but so what? We can’t win by sitting on our fannies giving our stuff in driblets all over the world, with no theater getting enough.”
By March 1942 Marshall had sent the president a plan based on Eisenhower’s recommendations: An invasion could be mounted across the English Channel into occupied France by April 1, 1943. Or earlier, said Marshall, if Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union succeeded, and “if the imminence of Russian collapse requires desperate action.” In that case, a toehold should be swiftly secured on the continent, perhaps at the port city of Cherbourg or Le Havre. This backup operation, code-named Sledgehammer, could be launched as early as September 1, 1942.
On April 1, exactly a year before the proposed invasion, Marshall, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s closest confidant, watched intently as FDR thumbed through the plan, finally nodding his approval. The United States, assuming British concurrence, would begin to build a force in Britain to liberate occupied Europe and defeat Germany by striking across the Channel.
The president dispatched Marshall and Hopkins to London, and they returned within two weeks believing they had won Churchill’s assent. The sands soon began shifting under their feet, however, as the prime minister started promoting a campaign to roust the Germans and their Italian allies from North Africa. As he put it, “Control by Britain of the whole North African shore from Tunis to Egypt” was vital to Britain’s “free passage through the Mediterranean to the Levant and the Suez Canal.”
In short, Churchill saw the Mediterranean as the lifeline sustaining Britain’s colonial interests in the Middle East and Africa. He and his military chiefs advanced a second rationale favoring a North African offensive—one more palatable to Americans who balked at Britain’s naked imperialism: The United States lacked sufficient shipping to transport an invasion force all the way to England. Even with adequate numbers of ships, they argued, U.S. troops were too green to take on the Wehrmacht in Fortress Europe.
Churchill’s objections to attacking Europe wither under scrutiny, however. A glance at a map reveals a U.S. convoy would travel no farther going to England than to North Africa. Furthermore, his claim that American GIs were too unseasoned to prevail against the Germans can be countered, albeit in hindsight, by the successful Allied invasion of Normandy nearly 20 months later, in which three of five American divisions scheduled to go ashore had never experienced combat. Counting fresh replacements to veteran divisions, more than 60 percent of all these GIs had never faced the enemy.
Eisenhower, alarmed by Churchill’s plans, warned that diverting resources to North Africa “would eliminate the possibility of a major cross-Channel venture in 1943.” Nevertheless, FDR overruled his military advisers and on July 30 informed them that an operation against France’s North African colonies, code-named Torch, was now the “principal objective.” Eisenhower said it was the “blackest day in history” when he learned of Roosevelt’s decision. FDR, though surrounded by gold braid and stars, had made manifest who ultimately decided U.S. military strategy.
Why did the president buck the very professionals he had picked to run and win the war? The answer cannot have been that FDR shared Churchill’s reverence for empire; anti-imperialism was a major tenet of Roosevelt’s world outlook. The president said only, “I do not believe we can wait until 1943 to strike at Germany.”
It’s clear that FDR was influenced by his new ally’s bulldog tenacity and relentless efforts at persuasion. Further, Roosevelt respected the prime minister’s military credentials. The president had never worn a uniform, while Churchill was a graduate of Sandhurst, Britain’s military academy, as well as a former commissioned officer in the British Army and a veteran of combat in India’s Northwest Frontier, the Sudan, the Boer War, and the trenches of World War I. He had twice run the Royal Navy as First Lord of the Admiralty, and was now leading a nation that had been at war for more than two years. [See “Churchill at War,” Winter 2011.]
On November 8, 1942, Allied troops went ashore at the North African cities of Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers. Ironically, Torch meant that the first enemy forces the Americans fought in the European war were not Germans but the Vichy French who held much of North Africa. For the next four months, until the last of Germany’s Afrika Korps was driven from the continent, the Allies slogged across a thousand miles of desert, from Morocco to Tunisia, far more than the distance from Normandy to Berlin. They did capture 238,000 Axis troops. But the campaign cost the Allies 10,290 dead, 21,363 missing or captured, and another 38,688 wounded, many maimed for life. And still not a single Allied soldier stood in Nazi-controlled Europe.
A couple of months after Torch began, at the Casablanca conference in January 1943, Churchill argued vigorously for taking Sicily next. This would not only protect Britain’s Mediterranean artery, he maintained, but hasten Italy’s withdrawal from the war and provide the Allies with a foothold in Europe. Of course, he assured the Americans, invading the island would not interfere with their priority, planning for the cross-Channel invasion of France.
The prime minister’s proposal prompted another battle for FDR’s soul, since once again the American chiefs all opposed this campaign. Marshall warned that the invasion of France “would be a difficult if not impossible operation to undertake once we have committed ourselves to Operation Husky [the Allied plan to invade Sicily].” Eisenhower’s deputy, Mark Clark, was more trenchant. “The result will not be commensurate with the effort and the losses,” he wrote in his diary. Once again, Churchill prevailed. On July 10, 1943, nearly 3,000 vessels and 180,000 men—a force essentially the same size as the one that would land at Normandy and the largest amphibious force yet assembled—struck the island. Marshall asked, “Is Sicily to be a means to an end, or is Sicily to be an end in itself?”
The answer had come from Churchill months before Husky began. At the White House for his third wartime visit with FDR, in May 1943, he had wasted little time before lobbying for his next priority: The Allies must invade Italy proper as soon as Husky succeeded. Driving Italy out of the war would break up the Axis, he said, and “cause a chill of loneliness over the German people.”
Roosevelt’s poker-faced military chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, saw through the prime minister’s circumlocution. “Churchill made no mention of any British desire to control the Mediterranean…which many persons believed to be a cardinal principle of British national policy.” The prime minister’s campaign of persuasion remained fixed: Dither on invading France while focusing on the Mediterranean.
Roosevelt told his chiefs he “had always shrunk from the thought of putting large armies in Italy.” Italy, which offered airfields for bombing Germany, was a stopgap goal. His reluctance heartened Marshall, who was convinced that “the landing of ground forces in Italy would establish a vacuum in the Mediterranean” that would sop up resources necessary “to execute a successful cross-Channel operation.” In the end, however, the president again overruled his military team and sided with Churchill, encouraged by the prime minister’s assurance that he was not insisting on going beyond Rome.
In August 1943, three months after the close of Torch, the president and Churchill were returning to the White House from a conference in Quebec when General Marshall informed them that Operation Avalanche, the invasion of Italy, was under way. American and British troops were storming the beaches at Salerno, some 30 miles southeast of Naples. Italy proved a quagmire for Allied troops. And the campaign did not stop at Rome. At the war’s end, the Allies were still clawing their way up the Italian boot. The fighting in Sicily and mainland Italy cost 320,000 Allied casualties, including 30,040 American dead. An estimated 152,940 Italian civilians died as well. Supporters of the invasion could argue that it relieved pressure on the Russian front and tied up German troops who could otherwise have fought off the Normandy invasion. Perhaps. But it is undeniable that the Italian campaigns killed any hope of invading across the Channel in 1943 and gave the Germans another year to bolster their defenses. As the distinguished military analyst Hanson Baldwin summed up the Italian enterprise, “All roads led to Rome, but Rome led nowhere.”
FDR’s decisions as U.S. strategist-in-chief did not represent his only influence on the pace of victory in Europe. His role as American recruiter-in-chief was also key. His appointments were astute: Marshall as his right arm, Admiral Ernest J. King to lead the fleet, General Henry “Hap” Arnold to create an air force, Eisenhower to command in Europe, Douglas MacArthur and Chester Nimitz to conquer the Pacific. Unlike Churchill, who sacked generals left and right, FDR maintained an extraordinarily stable team. The American chiefs in office after Pearl Harbor were still at work at the war’s end, and those men strove to crush their foes in Europe and the Pacific as quickly as possible.
Nevertheless, Roosevelt’s strategic choices were clearly a principal influence on the war’s duration. There can be no doubt that the diversions into North Africa, Sicily, and Italy delayed the invasion of Western Europe, one of the two blows that finally brought Germany to its knees. (The other coming from the Russians, of course.) If the president had sided with his own military leaders instead of Churchill, V-E Day, victory in Europe, would almost certainly have come earlier, at least by a year, perhaps even sooner.
Joseph E. Persico is the author of Nuremburg and other acclaimed books. His current work, about FDR and his commanders, will be published later this year.
Originally published in the Spring 2012 issue of Military History Quarterly. To subscribe, click here.
