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