“Strip away the layers of hindsight, and you can see that he was motivated by a fear of gambling everything on an operation in France.”

By Allen Packwood

THIS YEAR SAW the 75th anniversary of Operation Overlord and the D-Day landings.

American casualties on Omaha Beach not-withstanding; the operation was a triumph of planning, preparation and execution. The vast naval component got the troops across the Channel with hardly a casualty, Allied aircraft obtained complete mastery of the skies, deception plans largely achieved the element of surprise, and within a week the beachheads had been secured and the initial mission objective of gaining a lodgement on the enemy occupied shore had been fulfilled.

When the break out came it was faster and more sweeping than most would have dared to predict. Paris was liberated on Aug. 25, Strasbourg in November, and by the end of the year Allied forces were preparing for the crossing of the Rhine and the final assault on Nazi Germany.

With the luxury of hindsight, it’s clear that the Allies had prepared the right strategy. Given the level of success, should they have gone into Europe earlier? And is it true that Churchill sought to delay and obstruct the 1944 campaign to liberate France?

On April 8, 1942, the notoriously frail Harry Hopkins, friend and emissary to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, arrived in London and delivered a letter from the White House to Winston Churchill. It read:

What Harry and Geo. Marshall will tell you about has my heart & mind in it. Your people & mine demand the establishment of a front to draw off pressure on the Russians, & these peoples are wise enough to see that the Russians are today killing more Germans & destroying more equipment than you and I put together. Even if full success is not attained, the big objective will be.

Though couched in the president’s informal style, this short and simple message was about grand strategy at the highest level. It marked the opening shot in what would become a long and complex war of words between the Americans and British on the nature and timing of a second front in Western Europe.

Churchill certainly advocated a peripheral strategy involving the Mediterranean, a policy backed by General Sir Alan Brooke and the other Chiefs of Staff, not least because the British were already fighting there. Yes, the Mediterranean campaigns were partly about defending Gibraltar, the Suez Canal and the British Empire’s sea routes to Asia, but it was also an approach born from the reality of the weakness of the British position in 1940.

Churchill had used his very first parliamentary address as prime minister to pledge himself to victory, but once France had fallen it was not easy to see how that victory would be obtained. During the Blitz he had promised the people that he would “give it ‘em back,” but the Royal Air Force could not yet bomb Germany on anything like the scale with which the Luftwaffe could hit Britain. The one place where Churchill could go on the offensive against the Axis, where he had an army and a fleet, was in the Mediterranean.

To do nothing — to fight nowhere — would have only led to a further loss of prestige and most likely weakened the country’s resolve to carry on. Churchill had already faced down suggestions from his foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, to explore possible peace terms, and he had very publicly pledged himself to a war policy. He now poured reinforcements into North Africa, even taking the enormous risk of sending half of Britain’s tanks to Egypt at a time when a German invasion of Britain could not be ruled out. But war has a momentum of its own, and once the battle was joined in the Mediterranean it was not easy to stop and divert resources elsewhere.

Despite initial successes against the Italians in 1940, the British soon found themselves facing the Germans. In 1941, Hitler invaded Greece and sent Rommel into North Africa and Churchill was increasingly forced back onto the defensive. America’s entry into the war following Pearl Harbor allowed the British prime minister to sleep the sleep of the saved and thankful, but only if U.S. force could be brought to bear in support of his existing dispositions.

He was at the White House with the president when the news of the fall of Tobruk reached him on June 21, 1942 and must have felt humiliated but relieved when Roosevelt immediately offered American aid.

Yet even once North Africa was won, there were sound reasons for following up with attacks against Sicily and Italy. At the Casablanca Conference in January of 1943, the Americans agreed to the continuation of the Mediterranean strategy. Roosevelt however was forced to acknowledge that the United States, which was already going on the offensive in the Pacific, did not yet have the resources to meet its existing obligations in North Africa while simultaneously attacking in France. Yet by committing to a campaign in Sicily, America was also further denuding any operation in France, at least temporarily, thereby effectively shelving the plan for any quick offensive across the Channel in 1943.

Was this an example of perfidious Albion? Of the wicked British tricking the Americans into a strategy they did not endorse? Churchill certainly played his hand well, and used his direct channel to Roosevelt. But the truth is surely that strategy and policy was thoroughly debated and that in the end both Churchill and Roosevelt – and their respective staffs – recognized the advantages of an incremental approach that took the fight to the enemy while allowing the Allies to build up their resources.

Britain and the United States did not yet have mastery of the skies over France or control of the Atlantic. The troops for a cross-Channel invasion needed to be built up and battle hardened. Their joint command structures and amphibious operations had to be worked out and tested too.

North Africa led to Italy, but it still remained U.S. policy to attack in France as soon as possible. At the Tehran Conference in November 1943, Roosevelt and Marshall dug in, ably supported by Stalin, and Churchill had to very grudgingly accept the curtailment of his Mediterranean strategy.

He did not do so easily. En route to a visit to Malta, he gave a “long tirade on evils of Americans” and felt inclined to say, “all right if you won’t play with us in the Mediterranean we won’t play with you in the English Channel.” At Cairo, he warned of the dangers of the tyranny of ‘Overlord,’ echoing similar sentiments while flying to Teheran, and telling his doctor that: “Because the Americans want to invade France in six months’ time, that is no reason why we should throw away these shining, gleaming opportunities in the Mediterranean.”

And when he complained to his wife Clementine about how terrible it was “fighting with both hands tied behind one’s back,” she was wise enough to caution “patience and magnanimity,” reminding him of his saying “that the only worse thing than Allies is not having Allies.”

Of course, Churchill was not opposed to the D-Day landings per se, but he was opposed to them in isolation. It was partly about defending the British position in the Mediterranean, no doubt it was also about laurels for the British army who had the overall command in Italy. But strip away the layers of hindsight, and you can see that he was also motivated by a fear of gambling everything on an operation in France.

On the eve of D-Day, Churchill dined alone with Clementine.

“Do you realize that by the time you wake up in the morning 20,000 men may have been killed?” he mused.

Although in declining health, Churchill did not take to his bed and have a nervous breakdown, as a recent movie would have you believe. Instead, he asked the King if he could accompany the troops. But it was his job to worry – and it was a worry that was shared by the other Allied commanders, by Ramsay, Brooke and even by Eisenhower as Supreme Commander, who wrote a sealed letter to be opened in the event of the landings failing. We take their success for granted; Churchill could not.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Allen Packwood is the author of How Churchill Waged War: The Most Challenging Decisions of the Second World War. A Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and the director of the Churchill Archives Centre, he was co-curator of “Churchill and the Great Republic,” a 2004 Library of Congress exhibition and of “Churchill: The Power of Words,” a display at the Morgan Library in New York in 2012.

(Originally published Aug, 27, 2019)