Twelve Desperate Miles by Tim Brady Read Free Book Online Page B

and an accompanying crew of military brass from each branch of the service. The heavy hitters had come to meet with their Allied counterparts, the chiefs of staff of the British services, as well as Marshall’s man in England, Eisenhower. This was the colloquy that would outline thedirection the Allies in Europe were to travel through the coming months of 1942 and, by extension, the whole war. The entry of the United States into the fighting—the engagement that everyone from New York Harbor to the Golden Gate Bridge had been expecting for months now—was about to begin, the particulars to be hashed out by Marshall and company in England.
    For months, the two governments had been trying to settle a basic dispute about how to fight the war against Nazi Germany. The simple facts were that Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union were in desperate need of some relief from the onslaught that they faced from Germany. They had been imploring the United States and Great Britain to open a second front from the moment the United States had entered the war. No one, East or West, was certain how long the Soviets could last against Hitler’s attack, but the dire straits and desperate conditions of the Russian people after a year of massive assault were well known. Already hundreds of thousands were dead on the eastern front, and earlier that summer Germany had begun to mount another offensive aimed at the heart of the Soviet nation.
    The question was what strategy the Allies should pursue to wage war and alleviate the situation in the east. Marshall, Eisenhower, and most of the U.S. Army command favored a cross-channel assault against Germany in France. With typical American brio and a strategy that had been prevalent in the American army since the days of U. S. Grant and the American Civil War, their central idea was simply to pursue the enemy directly and with as much force as possible. If an attack against Germany in France in 1942 was now unlikely, given the quickly advancing calendar, then it should be made the following spring. Eisenhower himself had outlined the strategy, labeled Operation Roundup, while working under Marshall in the spring of 1942, still in Washington.
    The British were dead set against the idea. It was premature, they said. The Americans were naive to think that they could mount a successful battle on the beaches of France against an already entrenched andpowerful Nazi force. It would be slaughter, and since the initial invasion would have to be carried out largely by British forces, due to American army inexperience and the need for the United States to become further mobilized, Her Majesty’s high command was not enthusiastic, to say the least. To his daily log, Marshall’s counterpart, General Alan Brooke, called Marshall’s notion of a cross-channel attack “just fantastic.” The British proposed instead to attack the Wehrmacht through Norway, through North Africa, or by means of relentless bombings of Germany spiced by strategic commando raids against Nazi defenses in France that would force the Third Reich to stretch its defenses to razor-thin peril across two thousand miles of European coastline.
    Gathered at the trapezium-shaped War Office building in Whitehall, London, home of the British department of war, Brooke and Marshall were the chief protagonists in the debate, and they quickly fulfilled a long tradition in American and British relationships. That is to say,Marshall felt that Brooke was patronizing, and Brooke felt that Marshall was too inexperienced, someone who had never served as an officer in the field and was therefore a political general with no real sense of what war was about.
    The Norway attack was rather quickly dismissed as strategically pointless to the western Allies and ineffective in terms of alleviating pressure on the eastern front. The British pushed hard for an attack against North Africa, but the problems of an assault there were many in American minds. First among these