Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [130]
20. Allied Strategic Problems: Upgrading the Pacific
IN THE LAST SIX MONTHS of 1942 the war approached an equilibrium. The Allies were no longer losing it and they now began to have sufficient men and material to consider various options of one kind or another. The Russians, though hard pressed, were obviously surviving; the Japanese advance had slowed and then ground to a stop, and victory was just down the road in North Africa. It was time to get out the maps and look ahead to the future.
For the Western Allies, the next big operation after the clearing of the southern Mediterranean shore had to be an invasion of the European mainland. Where would it be? The German conquests included nearly all of the Continent, so there was a number of possible choices. They could invade France, they could move north to Scandinavia, or they could continue in the Mediterranean. There were advantages and disadvantages wherever they went.
Invading Scandinavia was set aside as essentially fruitless. The recovery of Norway would achieve only a safer route to North Russia, and was probably not worth the effort. Better to let the Germans keep their quarter of a million troops on occupation duties up there, and leave them alone. The invasion of France was clearly the key matter; everyone knew it had to be done, and the only real question was how soon, and what ought to precede it. An invasion of northern France and a drive due east to the Rhine and into Germany was a knife thrust to the heart, one which the Germans could be expected to counter with everything they had. The best estimates were that the Allies were not yet ready, and that therefore operations ought to continue in the Mediterranean. That at least was the way the British thought about it; the Americans were less certain. General Marshall and the American Chiefs of Staff already believed that they had been shunted into the North African operation. They saw themselves the victims of a vicious circle; unable to invade France immediately, they were forced to divert forces elsewhere; the more they diverted forces elsewhere, the more distant the proposed invasion date became. It was with an increasingly ill grace that they listened to the British sing their Mediterranean song. Yet they found themselves undercut by events. After Kasserine Pass and the serious shaking the Americans took in Tunisia, even their field commanders such as Eisenhower were prepared to accept the British view, that the Germans were too tough at the moment for a successful Allied invasion of France. The Mediterranean it had to be.
Within the theater itself there were several possibilities. The whole northern shore of the sea is made up of a series of peninsulas or islands, any one of which might serve as a stepping stone into Europe. First there was Spain. The Allies were not impressed by Franco’s official neutrality and they would have invaded Spain had they seen any real profit in it. But as Henri IV said in the seventeenth century, Spain is a country where small armies are defeated and large armies starve. To invade Spain meant a long fight through the Iberian Peninsula, with the Pyrénées and another long fight through France after that.
Next came the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, the former Italian, the latter French and occupied by the Italians. These possessed very considerable