General Brooke and the British Chiefs of Staff, despite their concerns, soon fell in line with their prime minister. But both the American Chiefs of Staff, and General Eisenhower and his planning team in Britain – Mark Clark included – were deeply sceptical, believing an invasion of north-west Africa would be a major deviation from their main goal – and one that could, if undertaken, see hopes for an assault on France dashed even in 1943. Roosevelt, however, saw some merit in the plan, and having accepted there was no other viable place they could successfully bring about a second front, supported Churchill’s proposals. The misgivings amongst his military commanders may have continued, but Roosevelt had made up his mind and his word was final. The invasion of north-west Africa was on.
This, then, was how the Mediterranean strategy was born. In a remarkably short time, Eisenhower, together with General Clark as his chief planner, diverted their attention to an invasion of north-west Africa instead of France. In November 1942, as the Eighth Army was soundly beating Rommel’s German-Italian army at El Alamein, a joint British and American invasion force landed in Morocco and Algeria. The landings were an astonishing achievement and produced a rapid and overwhelming victory. Admittedly, the opposition had hardly been very stiff, but conception to execution had taken a little over three months. It showed what could be achieved, logistically at any rate.
It certainly got Churchill’s mind whirring. Suddenly he began to see a wealth of opportunities emerging in the Mediterranean. With the whole of North Africa secure, he realised that Britain and America would be ‘in a position to attack the underbelly of the Axis at whatever may be the softest point, i.e. Sicily, southern Italy or perhaps Sardinia; or again, if circumstances warrant, or, as they may do, compel, the French Riviera or perhaps even, with Turkish aid, the Balkans’.17
This memo to his War Cabinet in October 1942 showed that Churchill was beginning to think in terms of a double second front – one that could be opened alongside the cross-Channel invasion. Churchill has often been accused of putting his designs for the Mediterranean above those of the invasion of France, but this was not the case in the autumn of 1942. There were few people more determined to see, for instance, the cross-Channel invasion take place in 1943, something Churchill stuck to longer than most. But he was the arch-opportunist, a man who never lost sight of the ultimate goal, but who was always open to new ways and different approaches to achieving that final victory.
By January 1943, with the defeat of Axis forces in North Africa looking to be inevitable – even if it was taking considerably longer than originally envisaged – a more concrete Mediterranean strategy was agreed. At the Casablanca Conference that month, the decision was made to follow success in North Africa with an invasion of Sicily. This, it was argued, would knock out Axis airfields threatening Allied shipping in the Mediterranean, but more importantly would provide the Allies with the greatest chance of forcing Italy out of the war, and, for the time being, was considered the best way to continue closing the ring around Germany – even if that meant postponing the invasion of northern France for yet another year.
This time it had been General Brooke who successfully manipulated the Americans into following the British way of thinking, and with the subsequent capture of more than 250,000 Axis troops in Tunisia, Churchill finally began to start looking towards the long and mountainous leg of Italy.
The news of the victory in North Africa in May 1943 came as the Prime Minister was steaming his way across the Atlantic for yet more talks, and in the flush of so emphatic a triumph both he and the British Chiefs of Staff were unsurprisingly gung-ho about what might still be achieved that year. German forces, they argued, were now widely stretched, not just in Russia, where the tide seemed to be turning in the wake of the Red Army’s victory at Stalingrad in February, but elsewhere too: trouble was brewing in the Balkans; in France, which since the Allied invasion of North Africa was now entirely, rather than partially, occupied; resistance was also growing in Norway; and Italy appeared to be on the point of collapse. If and when Italy was out of the war, Germany would have to replace the half-million Italian troops in Greece and the Balkans, not to mention the figure that would surely be diverted to Italy itself, as well as the French Riviera and other borders now vulnerable to Allied attack. This kind of dispersal of forces, they suggested, was just what was needed to help the Allies get a toe-hold in France for 1944.
With this in mind, the British pressed their case to follow an invasion of Sicily with an invasion of southern Italy. This would open up yet further airfields from which to attack the German Reich, and could lead to exploitation eastwards into the Balkans and Aegean. At the very least, they argued, this use of their massed forces would be of greater help to the cross-Channel invasion than transferring most of the troops in the Mediterranean back to Britain. And in the best-case scenario, who was to say such operations might not prove decisive?
If the British were getting carried away with themselves, it was hardly surprising. Not only had they fought through a long, three-and-a-half-year campaign in North Africa, they had had interests in the Mediterranean dating back to Nelson’s day, nearly a hundred and fifty years before. The Americans, however, had none of these emotional attachments and had so far played a far smaller role in the theatre. ‘The Mediterranean,’ General Marshall said at a meeting of the Combined Chiefs in May 1943, was ‘a vacuum into which America’s great military might could be drawn off until there was nothing left with which to deal the decisive blow on the Continent.’18 They had agreed to North Africa, and had been persuaded there was sense to the invasion of Sicily, but they were damned if British over-enthusiasm for the Mediterranean was going to get in the way of the stated and original Number One Goal: the invasion of France.
Determined not to be outmanoeuvred, as they had been at Casablanca, General Marshall insisted that a date for the cross-Channel invasion be decided upon and that this should be the priority over and above any other operations. Only when the British had agreed to 1 May, 1944, for what he now appropriately renamed Operation OVERLORD, and had accepted that a certain number of troops would have to be withdrawn back to Britain to help with that task, would Marshall acquiesce to any further Allied action in the Mediterranean, whether it be the invasion of Italy or anywhere else.
The British agreed with the American terms – after all, they still believed in the invasion of France too – but to Churchill’s great frustration, no definite plan was made about what should follow the successful conquest of Sicily and by 10 July 1943, the day the Allies made their landings on the southern Italian island, the matter had still not been resolved.
The decision to go on and invade southern Italy was finally taken on 16 July. It had, in fact, been prompted by none other than Marshall himself, who proposed an amphibious operation to take Naples and then to push on as quickly as possible to Rome. Needless to say, the British Prime Minister jumped at this suggestion. ‘I am with you,’ Churchill cabled to Marshall on hearing this plan of action, ‘heart and soul.’19
No one was under any illusion, however, that Italy would be an easy place to fight a campaign should the Germans make a stand – not since Belisarius in the sixth century had Rome been captured from the south. Yet despite General Marshall’s lack of enthusiasm for any further Mediterranean strategy, he recognised the necessity of both knocking Italy out of the war for good and drawing German troops away from northern France and Russia; and Italy was the only feasible place in which they could do this. Air superiority was a prerequisite for any seaborne landing, so this ruled out southern France; capturing Sardinia and Corsica were possibilities but would not draw enemy troops or necessarily prompt Italy’s collapse; while an invasion of Greece and the Balkans carried the same risks as Italy, the roads and lines of communication there were considerably worse, nor would there be the benefits of a sizeable launch pad