Operation Roundup

In his comment about my D-Day post earlier in the week, Ben asks:

Do you have an opinion on how successful a 1943 landing would have been? It's a highly politicized question hinging largely around wartime russophilia, but it came up lately on alt.books.george-orwell and I realized I had no idea whether it had even been an option.

In commenting about counter-factuals, one should bear in mind what David Hackett Fischer has to say about the Fallacy of Fictional Questions (Historians' Fallacies, pp. 15-21):

There is nothing necessarily fallacious in fictional constructs, as long as they are properly recognized for what they are and are clearly distinguished from empirical problems... Fictional questions can also be heuristically useful to historians, somewhat in the manner of metaphors and analogies, for the ideas and inferences which they help to suggest. But they prove nothing and can never be proved by an empirical method. All historical "evidence" for what might have happened if [John Wilkes] Booth had missed his mark is necessarily taken from the world in which he hit it. there is no way to escape this fundamental fact.

In other words, this is an interesting question, but there is nothing definitive or even convincing that can be argued about it.

That having been said, let's start with a little background. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Dwight Eisenhower, as chief of the War Plans department, proposed that the United States adopt an offensive posture in one theater and a defensive one everywhere else. He believed that the offensive theater ought to be Europe and that the United States and Great Britain ought to plan for a cross-Chanel invasion of France with 48 divisions on or before April 1, 1943. The codename for this proposed operation was Roundup. In the event that the Soviet Union appeared to be on the verge of collapse before that date, Eisenhower proposed a smaller invasion with five divisions in the fall of 1942 (codename Sledgehammer). The Europe First strategy that Eisenhower proposed did not endear him to Douglas MacArthur or to the US Navy, both of which wanted the emphasis to be on the Pacific theater; but George Marshall, the Chief of Staff of the US Army, adopted Eisenhower's arguments, and he convince President Roosevelt to adopt them, too.

The British government, however, was not enthusiastic at all for a cross-channel invasion. They were worried about the cost in men and materiel, and they consequently preferred a strategy of attacking the Germans around the periphery of their empire. This had the effect of them dedicating resources to North Africa to protect the Suez Canal and their route to India. Initially, the British agreed to go along with the American plan, but later in 1942, they reneged on their commitments to it. The Americans then agreed to invade French North Africa, and Operation Torch was born. The diversion of American and British resources to the North African campaign and later to the invasion of Sicily and the Italian mainland in 1943 essentially ended all possibility of a cross-channel invasion in that year and set the stage for the Operation Overlord planning for an invasion in 1944.

So what would have happened if the British and Americans had attempted a cross-channel invasion in 1943? I don't know, and neither does anyone else. Such an invasion would have implied the abandonment of the invasion of Sicily and Italy, since the Western Allies did not have enough men and materiel to do both. In all probability, it would have also implied that they did not attempt the Torch landings in 1942. That would have meant that the men and commanders in both armies but particularly the American one, would have completely lacked experience when they landed on the beaches of France. The paratroop drops during Overlord weren't an example of anything other than what not to do, but they were still better than the fiasco during the Sicilian campaign. The North African, Sicilian, and Italian landings were smaller scale than what was attempted during Overlord, but they gave staffs experience in planning such things and the Navy practice in getting the men and equipment on shore. They wouldn't have had that experience if the cross-channel invasion were undertaken in 1943.

More than the experience, the Allies wouldn't have had the same resources available if they had attempted the landings in 1943. Sufficient numbers of specialized landing craft had not been built then. The P51 Mustang, which gave the Allies air superiority over Western Europe, did not enter service until early 1944. The number of trained personnel that the US Army had available in 1943 was significantly smaller than it was in 1944. The incredible buildup of supplies that preceded the 1944 invasion would not have been nearly as far along if the invasion had taken place in 1943. And then there is the incredible deception campaign that the British and Americans conducted prior to the 1944 invasion. It succeeded so well that Hitler was convinced for days after the Normandy landings that they were a diversion. The confusion that the deception campaign sowed among the Germans kept German reinforcements off the battlefield until the Allies could consolidate and secure their beachheads. That deception campaign would not have had a chance to work if the invasion had taken place in 1943.

Finally, there is the question of the German Army. It is true that the Germans took advantage of the year between the spring of 1943 and the spring of 1944 to build and strengthen the Atlantic Wall of fortifications and that these fortifications made the invasion more problematic. Still, the Allies managed to breach those fortifications with relatively little loss of life within hours of the landings. More important was the fact that they were facing a German Army that had been depleted by another year of fighting against the Soviets. It is true that the Germans were preparing for the Kursk offensive in the spring of 1943 and consequently had fewer men immediately available then on the Western front than they would have to face Overlord, but the German Army in 1943 had more and better men than it did in 1944.

All of these considerations lead me to conclude that a cross-channel invasion in 1943 would have stood less (and probably considerably less) chance of success than Operation Overlord did in 1944. Ultimately, this conclusion is impossible to prove or even to justify satisfactorily but I think that it is accurate nonetheless.