A Year Sooner

Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM

In a discussion with Chris on WW2 one day last week I was challenged to move Overlord up a year. Now this WAS possible. It is not even highly unlikely. FDR and Marshall had envisioned a possible war in Europe from the Fall of France onwards. Note: envisioned, not plotted for. The US military went from underestimating Hitler before Dunkirk to greatly overestimating Hitler and his military power until the breakout from Normandy. We played conservatively. The official estimate had the UK not lasting two months after the fall of France. We made the same mistaken estimate at the start of Barbarossa regarding the Soviets.

My changes begin with the Fall of France. The US called up its reserves, brought back conscription and began mobilizing for war. The basic navy construction program was the two-Ocean navy program of 1938, geared mostly to fighting Japan while providing enough of an Atlantic Fleet for continental defense.

Sending a new AEF to Europe and taking the offensive against Hitler was widely unpopular in the US beyond an Anglophile elite and liberal minority. The most FDR politically was willing to do was provide aid short of war to the UK – weapons, financial support, a [very] few volunteers. I will not change this as regards ground and air forces. Doing so is extremely improbable without earlier changes to the US political structure.

However, continental defense was popular. Even FDR’s America First opponents were for this. Yet in a bit of planning stupidity, we did virtually nothing to prepare to defend coastal and Caribbean commerce. The danger was knowable and foreseeable. Submarine warfare was what got us [in theory] into WW1. It was the obvious way for Hitler to retaliate against our aid to the UK. There was no way of knowing in advance that Hitler until Pearl Harbor would be more prudent than the Kaiser and Luddendorf were.

Further the bulk of the steps needing to be taken did not compete with other arms programs for the US or Lend Lease for the UK. Creating extra US armored divisions requires tanks, cadre, artillery, etc. all of which had no excess supply. Using small shipyards to build cheap freighters, tankers and small anti-submarine ships was simply using resources that were still idle from the Depression [see 1942-44 when we did just this].

So over the year and a half from Paris to Pearl the US Atlantic Fleet gets a dozen escort carriers, a hundred or so smaller escorts [frigates, corvettes, sub chasers, a few destroyer escorts] and a great deal of on the job patrol training covering the coastal and Caribbean commercial routes. Obsolete shore based aircraft are given to the navy for anti-submarine patrol. [The navy part of this is key – the US Army Air Corps, later Air Force [Air Farce in my book], has never taken any mission in support of other services seriously. Douhet poisoned them from the 1920’s onward.]. A network of Naval Air Stations is set up on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Our Caribbean ‘friends’ [Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua and Panama] plus our own possessions [Virgin Islands, Canal Zone, and Puerto Rico] get their own network. The leased base concept is extended further than in OTL to the British and Dutch Caribbean possessions. The administrative and staff work is done to institute an immediate convoy structure and system should war with Germany begin. Finally a command change is made. King was a disaster in this job. Move him to the Asiatic Fleet and put someone decent [Nimitz for argument’s sake but I have other possibilities if necessary { Stark, Leahy, Richardson, Fletcher, Sprunce}] in charge at Norfolk.

All of this is politically possible and does not require 20/20 hindsight. All of this plus beginning the buildup of tankers and merchant shipping will make the initial German submarine offensive off the US East Coast and Caribbean a scare instead of the disaster it was in OTL. Essentially the six month early disaster at sea lost any real chance of a 1942-43 invasion. Our buildup in the UK will be faster. This will in part mean that the US will mobilize a few dozen more divisions by 1943-44. It will also make what follows possible although not certain without the other changes I am about to outline.

The second change is going to seem perverse. FDR acted to save the UK from bankruptcy. However, he also manipulated Lend Lease to keep British finances dire with the [apparent, motives with FDR never being certain] aim of keeping the UK weak and dependant for the post-war period. This contrasts to Stalin where Lend Lease and other financial measures were frankly used to bribe him into marginal policy concessions. Let us presume that FDR was more serious about Marshall’s cross channel strategy than his actions showed in OTL. We had the lever. I am proposing that we use it.

The first time we use it is to persuade Churchill to overrule Bomber Harris on the employment of strategic bombers. The very long range planes must instead give first priority to anti-submarine work over the mid- Atlantic gap and Bay of Biscay. This will probably necessitate sacking Harris and having Marshall directly threaten to sack his US counterparts.

The combination of a better pre-war US Atlantic plan / force structure and more very long range anti-sub aircraft usage mean that TORCH need not preclude 1943 Overlord. However, TORCH made a 1943 invasion impossible two ways. The first was the force tradeoff – there simply weren’t enough US ground or air units on the right side of the Atlantic to do both. The reason for that was winning the battle of the Atlantic in 1943 instead of 1942 as we set it up.

The second of course was that Ike’s conservative plan plus a political mistake allowed the Germans to make enough of a buildup in Tunisia to use up half of 1943 ending the North African portion of the war. The British planners recognized this but could not get Ike to risk losses on convoys closer to Sicily. The US planners were highly conservative operationally, logistically and in their insistence of not operating without total air superiority [this made US moves highly predictable to both German and Japanese intelligence].

So we will have the British push a few convoys directly into the Tunisian ports [this was what they asked for and Ike vetoed].. There will be some loss of surprise and higher casualties. However, the surprise aspect mattered less than both sets of planners anticipated. Totally fixated on the East, Berlin ignored what was happening until the landings were announced. Fuhrer states have a problem with multiple focus…LOL.

So a very small Allied force will precariously be ashore in Tunisia. We will now change how the Allies handled Admiral Darlan. In OTL the US grossly overestimated the willingness of the local Vichy French to rally to the Allied cause [after Dakar, Syria and Madagascar this was REALLY stupid but typically American]. The fighting only ended by a lucky accident. Darlan was in Algiers on personal business [his son was in hospital]. He had the prestige and authority to order a stand-down. We then allowed / arranged for him to be assassinated, largely in response to progressive and left opinion in both nations having a cow over cooperating with ‘fascism’.

I will presume sufficient pragmatism asserts itself here. The two leaders ride out the political storm and insist on a coalition government [Darlan, DeGaulle, Girard]. This was the tack taken to force nationalists [and royalists] to deal with their mortal left / Communist enemies in Yugoslavia, Greece, Poland and China. The difference here is having the balls to weather a domestic flap for the sake of military advantage. The US had maintained diplomatic relations with Vichy so it is less of a stretch. For the UK, offer a financial adjustment to appease Labor [say an extra sugar ration for a quarter or some such].

[As a sidelight, I will advance from 1943 the West forcing Portugal to let them use the Azores for air and naval bases – this is another major help in the Atlantic submarine war. The excuse will be to keep the Germans from seizing them after the Germans overrun the unoccupied zone in France].

So the Axis attempt to retake Tunis with airborne units is defeated by the Vichy garrison with Allied help. Rommel gets part of the Africa Corps out of Tripoli before the new Western air bases in Tunisia doom the rest. Instead of spending the winter-spring of 1942-43 in a messy stalemate on the Tunisian-Algerian border, the West take Corsica and Sardinia while making a lodgment in Sicily. Unlike in OTL they will force the Axis out of Sicily by an end-run into the Italian toe. So by March of 1943 the Central Mediteranean is open to Allied shipping with South Italy as a major theater of attritional air warfare. [Note: all of this is bolder than Ike would have done but within what Churchill and many of the British commanders wished for – the British were bolder in peripheral operations in the Med, which they believed in, and much more conservative about Normandy which they were trying to avoid].

The next change is to dump the Combined Bomber Offensive. We must attrit the German Air Force in 1942-43. The Mediteranean will do a lesser share than in OTL. Tunisia was in many ways the graveyard of both the German transport air strength and of their medium bombers, who were pressed into a transport role. They will lose fewer planes and kill more of ours in Sicily and Italy. So the Combined Bomber Force must return to daylight raids within fighter range of the UK. The targets must be German army units plus the supporting economies of France and the Benelux. This will probably take demoting bomber generals to pilot officers and again bribing the British. It will allow some increase in German production. However, mostly it will see the German fighter arm ground down by massive numbers of Allied fighters instead of fighting unescorted bombers. We will not have the superiority of June of 1944. We will have a MUCH better position than we actually had in May of 1943.

The German Army in the West will also be MUCH weaker. It will have been forced to disperse as a protection against air attack. The forces in the coastal zones will have a major morale problem. Constant strafing does that to men. In OTL there were few beach defenses outside the actual ports and Calais before early 1944 when Rommel arrived. Here Rommel will still be in Italy. The endless air attack will mean even fewer fortifications in Normandy.

The next issue is landing craft. FDR will have to actually enforce his priority for Europe. In OTL he let King flagrantly cheat. King is in Australia if he isn’t dead [remember that we put him in charge of the Asiatic Fleet].. Nimitz, Stark and Leahy actually do follow orders. On top of that it will be necessary to use the financial levers with Churchill. For political reasons he would not confront Labor on productivity [or lack thereof] in UK shipyards. For financial reasons he would not allow overtime. The US can offer financial concessions plus making some of the extra shipping available for better rations for Labor’s constituents in the trade union movement. So we will presume that this marginal shortage is solved.

The final hurdle is a big one. The British Chiefs really did not believe in the whole cross Channel obsession of the Americans. They understood the logic – the only way to use the large forces defending the UK was across the Channel; the UK was a better base than Egypt or North Africa; the Channel was the shortest route to the Ruhr over the best terrain. They had been badly burned on the Western Front in WW1 and again in 1940. They simply didn’t want to confront the German army head on. They had no other strategy.

In OTL the British ran out of excuses by the time of Overlord. In this ATL I have removed the principal ones. There will be enough American divisions still in the UK and coming so the American operation will not rest largely on British blood for more than the first few weeks. The Central Mediteranean will have been solved and Egypt saved. The US will have made a clear priority choice against the Pacific.

So we get Normandy before Kursk. The actual invasion goes far more easily than in OTL. Better air prep, fewer German defenders and much less fortification combine to achieve closer to the originally planned gains. This does not actually get you to the Ruhr much faster. Losing Normandy quicker will allow the German army to keep retreating to the next river line in France and then the next…so it will be more like Russia than the charge across France. The year’s respite from the Combined Bomber offensive will mean more German tanks and guns to go around. Also Italy will not have been driven from the war which had a major negative effect on the German war effort. More Americans, Brits and Canadians will die. However , the Soviet claim to have won the war by themselves will be more transparently bullshit. The occupation zones in Germany are more likely to be draw more to western satisfaction. Also the war in Europe is likely to end months sooner. No way to tell for sure as there are too many variables.