Sledgehammer 1942

Feodosia Landing - 29 Dec 1941? Followed by Operation Bustard Hunt in May 1942? Soviet casualties - between 150,000 - 180,000 roughly? All from Wikipedia. I suspect Brooke would not have approved the Kerch assault although Joseph Stalin could be persuasive!

Regards

Tom

 

I can't think of any other cases myself. The last of the 3 you mention would be Milne Bay in New Guinea, but I think the Japanese force was well under the (arbitrary?) 5000 man threshold I gave. Norway in 1940 is more of a successful German amphibious operation as they were the only ones actually landing on a hostile shore (I could be wrong about this but I think the British and French only landed in areas where they knew there were no Germans). The Leros force was defeated by a German counter amphibious invasion as was the force on Kos the month before. Note that the RN thwarted the first German attempt to land at Leros when some light surface warships sunk basically all the invasion force it encountered. Only after the GAF established dominance of the air were they able to successfully land on Leros a month later.

The one thing they all have in common even if you include Milne Bay and the Allies in Norway and the Dodecanese is that the failing side had little or no supporting air. They are all pretty much half-hearted efforts or side-shows for the defeated side as well.

So we could say 1 or 3 or no failed amphibious landings, depending on how you define it and what parameters you use, but the point I wanted to make is that there are not that many failures especially compared to the number of successes, even by countries that did not have a fraction of the naval capabilities of the Anglo-Americans and did not engage in elaborate preparations in terms of training and the accumulation of special landing craft of the kind we are often told were indispensable for such operations.

EDIT: Just thought of another one myself: Dakar. Still, this one, like the others, suffers from lack of air support (though that probably was not the fatal defect in this case). There are also other flaws that these few failed amphibious ops share in common but they tend to be ones not shared with Sledgehammer.

 

I know little about Narvik 1940 and on a swift read some Allied elements did use barges etc to land (landing French tanks too somehow). As the Germans held Narvik port and city the Allies must have landed at small ports locally. See: Battles of Narvik - Wikipedia.

 

Yes, that was the case I was thinking of. The Soviets had no elaborate amphibious training and no special landing craft. They did pay a big price for those deficiencies at the tip of the Kerch Peninsula in earlier landings, but still succeeded in capturing it when they landed at the neck of the peninsula at Feodosia. It was significant in that it delayed Manstein's attempt to capture Sebastapol by several months.

That was well after the amphibious phase of the operation was over, so in a way outside the scope of what I was talking about, but, you're right in the sense that later on the Germans were able to drive out the enemy force that had captured a somewhat similar peninsula amphibiously. What I would say in response was the the Germans were able to accomplish this by focusing their available forces, especially their air forces, on a single operation (this would be the one strong concentration of warplanes the Germans had in the 2nd half of 1942, and they shuttled it from one area to the next to fully leverage it) while the Stalin was distracted by other priorities - defending against another possible German drive on Moscow and launching his own counteroffensive around Izium.

That is one of the points I am trying to make. German military successes were often the result of their concentration of effort against an enemy who was, for good reason or bad, preoccupied with multiple other things at the time. Concentration of effort was hardly a new or revolutionary concept but it just was something the Allies failed to do over and over again during the war. especially at the beginning of the war.

Arguably, however, they never really learned to do that it's just that their material superiority eventually became such that they could engage in multiple campaigns at once and enjoy large margins of superiority in each. That was not so much the case in late 1942, although there was no reason they could not have gone ahead with Guadalcanal and 2nd El Alamein even if they had done Sledgehammer, because the latter would have leveraged forces not used for the former two. I am thinking especially of Allied airpower already concentrated geographically in southern England that was being un- or mis-used at the time as well as the naval forces they would use to support Torch, that was already based in the English Channel, or otherwise not being used.

For once, concentrate all available forces not needed elsewhere on one operation - the was the Sledgehammer opportunity and it was something that the Allies could not accomplish for many months in northwest Africa due to the "tyranny of distance".

 

Hi Gary,

I thought this snip from the Eisenhower papers (pp.626-627) describing the training state of 1st Infantry Division might be of use:

"October 20, 1942
To George Catlett Marshall

Dear General: I have just returned from a rather difficult inspection trip in Scotland, where I went to see amphibious exercises carried out by the First Division...
The exercises that I witnessed had, as usual, both encouraging and discouraging aspects. The men looked fine and, without exception, were earnestly trying to do the right thing. I spoke to scores of them, in the pitch dark, and found that their greatest weakness was uncertainty! Most of them did not know exactly what was expected of them. This extended all the way from the method of challenging to actions in tactical moves. All this, of course, is the business of the officer - the Major, the Captain, and the Lieutenant. It is in this level of command that we have our most glaring weakness and it is one that only time and eternal effort can cure. We are short on experience and trained leadership below battalion commander, and it is beyond the capacity of any Division Commander or any Colonel to cure these difficulties hurriedly. Time is essential."

No doubt, inspections of British formations would have revealed similar shortcomings.

Regards

Tom

 

I find this thread a very high quality collection of informed and well researched views. I am prompted to add my six pennyworth to this post by Tom O'Brien in his post #125 immediately above on the state of preparedness of the US 1st Infantry Division. (Who like the 34th ID and 1AD were also shedding good men to form the rangers and US paras while in Britain). I cannot remember whether or not anyone has thrown the following into the mix. According to Dr Timothy Harrison Place, in his book Military Training in the British Army 1940-1944, page 3, citing ‘Reports on State of Training of Field Force Formations’, 22 April 1942, TNA WO 205/1C, the British army completed an efficiency audit of six armoured and 19 infantry divisions in April 1942. The verdict was stark. Only three of these twenty-five divisions were immediately fit for battle.His book rather shows the army was not in good shape then. The state of both the US and British armies was pretty dicey in the spring of 1942, at a time when the demands of the Western Desert and SE Asia campaigns were taxing British resources.

 

Hi,

Thanks for that observation. I have that book somewhere! I must dig it out and have another look.

Jonathon Fennell, in his Fighting the People's War, has a chapter which describes "The Great Imperial Morale Crisis" which the British forces suffered during 1942. He reflects on the lack of training facilities in the UK and the shortage of really skilled instructors, pointing out that the available training grounds were so small that it wasn't until March 1942 that a whole brigade could actually exercise as a whole using live ammunition and air support. (p.221).

I think there is a new book out about the 34th U.S. Infantry Division at the beginning of their war which would probably offer similar evidence. I don't suppose they could get much formation training done whilst in Northern Ireland.

Regards

Tom

 

Plenty of evidence 34thID in 1942 had no distinguished training record in the US prior to arrival in Northern Ireland and reports on their performance there were rather worrying. They were scattered across Northern Ireland and large scale collective training manoeuvres were rare events. That's what I have learned from my reading, but I have not read the new book. After about 1/3 sailed in the Torch invasion force on 21 October, the other 2/3 moved to mainland Britain, held in transit camps until they sailed in several convoys over the period leading up to around Christmas (not enough shipping for all to go at once). The experience of 1942 was that US forces must be absolutely trained to the hilt in the USA as there was very little space in Britain to train realistically in the UK as it appears Fennell agrees with in the case of the British (see Tom OBrien #127). US IDs I have looked at arriving in UK 1944 were basically route marching to maintain fitness and doing small scale training . One Chem warfare mortar company in 1944 only fired live explosive rounds twice in one or two months. (Chem rounds were never used in live action, they were really a heavy mortar unit, but capable of gas warfare)

 

Hi Tom,

From a report I found at Kew maybe 15 years ago, dating from May of 1942 (WO 216/81). It was written by a British officer accompanying Field Marshal John Dill and Gen. Marshall on a snap (only 1 day's notice given to the divisions) inspection tour of various US Army units training stateside, including the same 1st ID that Eisenhower would inspect months later, and also the 36th ID which would later land at Salerno.



Earlier the officer stated he was "struck by the thoroughness of basic individual training". He also writes "Sir John himself was, I know, extremely impressed by all he saw". Of course, there were some criticisms too, but overall it is very positive. It also notes that artillery are "admitted to be better" than infantry in National Guard units.

It's been 37 months since the outbreak of war, with limited conscription starting months before that follwoing the decision to expand to an army to over 30 divisions. That 37-month period would correspond to September 1917 in the Great War, the difference being that in 1914 I believe the British Army did not have the head start they would have when war was declared in 1939. How much more time did they need? If they hadn't gotten it right in the first 3 years why should they get it right after that? Again, I refer to what I posted before about the "ill-prepared and poorly supported brigade filled with inexperienced soldiers" (Niall Barr, Pendulum of War, p. 80), the 18th Indian Brigade, that stopped 2 of Rommel's divisions at El Alamein in July. I am not saying that more and better training is not beneficial, but past a certain point of training there are diminishing returns and if you are training bad doctrine then it is at least theoretically counterproductive.

Years ago I found an extensive interview of General William E. DePuy (https://history.army.mil/html/books/070/70-23/CMH_Pub_70-23.pdf) in which DePuy (who would in the 1960s command the 1st ID and then went on to head TRADOC, the training and doctrine command of the US Army) recalls in some detail his experience as a junior officer in the US Army in WWII. He did 4 years of ROTC while in college starting in the late 1930s. As a newly commissioned officer leading an infantry platoon he participated in the Louisiana Maneuvers in mid 1941. Later he transferred to the 90th ID and trained with them for 2 years prior to moving to England where they trained for 3 more months before they became one of the first follow on US divisions to land in Normandy, on the Cotentin no less (some advance parties landed late on D-Day itself).

Altogether he had had at least 7 years of preparation prior to his first combat experience in Normandy. He described the training, however, as "mechanical and technical rather than tactical" that "never did improve". One of the only "lessons learned" that they practiced prior to D-Day was the concept of "marching fire...that became somewhat of a fad...[in Normandy the result was] we marched into their killing zones". Later he states that in "Normandy, the 90th Division was a killing machine - of our own troops!" He recalled that in "the first six weeks of the battle in Normandy, the 90th lost 100 percent of its soldiers and 150 percent of its officers. In the rifle companies that translates to losses of between 200 and 400 percent".

DePuy also says it is "hard to overstate how ineffective that division was at the beginning, and how very effective it was at the end". How did that happen? "As the war went on a few survivors accumulated some seasoning through luck and natural cunning". In other words, combat experience.

He added that the only "part of the division which was really well-trained on the combat side was the artillery. The artillery is easier to train because it’s very mechanical and mathematical, and they do very well...the artillery was good...it was the infantry battalions, companies, platoons, and squads that I thought were poorly trained." Along similar lines: "all the energy and imagination in the division was totally absorbed in how we could get a regiment mounted up in trucks, move down the road, not get lost, and get there on time. We spent months just learning how to do that, whereas, we should have spent months learning how to fight." This explains how the US Army was able to move so effectively once they had broken out from Normandy.

So was the 90th an exception? Lets took at a division that landed on D-Day itself, the 29th ID. It arrived in Britain, interestingly enough, in early October 1942 (they mobilized a year and half before that). For the following 20 months it had 1 mission only - to prepare for an eventual cross-Channel invasion. If there was any unit more well positioned to soak up all the putative "lessons learned" and have the time and motive to incorporate it into their training it was the 29th. Here is an excerpt from Joseph Balkoski's, Beyond the Beachhead, p. 87:

In combat...it took a few weeks for the squad leaders to grasp the significant differences between real war and war "by the book," and by then many of them were dead...the men discovered the infantry tactics they had been taught were in urgent need of modification.
​

Sounds much like what DePuy had to say, doesn't' it?

Page 155 of Beyond the Beachhead recounts the extraordinary story on D+1 of the assistant division commander, Norman Cota, having to demonstrate to a clueless 29th ID infantry captain how to take a defended position by personally leading a squad of men in taking a house with a few Germans in it (when Cota had arrived on the scene and asked what the holdup was the captain replied "Sir, the Germans are in there, shooting at us"). There are more incidents I can cite from just this book that tell the same tale of combat unpreparedness, but I'll leave it at that.

When you look at the performance of other US divisions in Normandy, with the possible exception of 9th ID (and I emphasize possible) the story is pretty much the same: they stumble badly at first but then learn fairly quickly how to fight the Germans. They key thing is that the evidence shows the learning process takes place mostly after D-Day, not before.

As some of the better of studies of American combat performance in Normandy have shown, most American troops entered Normandy lacking even basic proficiency in combined-arms tactics. The Americans’ “most serious training deficiency” was in “effective cooperation between the combat arms” and were “deprived of combined arms training prior to D-Day” (Doubler, Closing with the Enemy, p. 60). The experience in Tunisia regarding “tank-infantry coordination was lost on the army as a whole. Not until several weeks into the Normandy campaign would the army put much-needed emphasis on infantry-tank training in combined arms” tactics and consequently most of their combat involved "unimaginative, frontal attacks". (Peter Mansoor, The GI Offensive In Europe, p. 94, 161). This was true even of units, like the 8th Infantry Division, that were reputed to have been among the best-trained in the American Army. (Weigley, Eisenhower’s Lieutenants, p. 134.) When one author concludes that in Normandy the “lessons of Kasserine Pass…had to be re-learned at a frightful cost” (Leo Daugherty, The Battle of the Hedgerows, p. 59) isn’t that admitting that the US Army as an institution never "learned" those lessons to begin with?

Note that many of these same works affirm, along with DePuy and Rommel (see my earlier posts on that) that American artillery is already excellent from the very beginning.

If the US Army had undergone such a significant improvement in the 20 months between October 1942 and June 1944 we should be able to find evidence of it not just in rare instances, but pretty much everywhere. What you see instead is an army that has basically the same strengths (artillery and logistics) and weaknesses (combined arms tactics) on D-Day as they had before and the real improvements coming in Normandy itself. If that is true, from the standpoint of troop readiness there was no benefit gained in the interim.

Again, this is why telling the Sledgehammer story is valuable in my opinion because in process of refuting the skeptics you get a clearer picture of what really did transpire during the war. It's not really about "proving" Sledgehammer would have succeeded.

 

Sledgehammer #129. Your bigger picture totally accords with my reading and research.

90th ID. It was Patton who had a large part to play in turning round the 90th after they re-attached to US Third Army. (They had been under 1st Army command from March.). May I recommend James Kelly Morningstar's Patton's Way: A Radical Theory of War for a contrast between how the US Army trained to fight pre and during WW2 with what Patton spent his time unscrambling and changing to his concept while in England with those corps and divisions he did have under command. His diary is full of it. Bradley was trained and believed in army doctrine of using troops in a climactic battle designed to break the enemy at one stroke. A head on battle like that, led by infantry, and only assisted by other arms, was bound to result in high casualties, and attritional warfare is still playing out now to this day. Patton believed in the cavalry flank attack, and overwhelming the enemy by fire and manoeuvre. He wanted to create chaos and uncertainty in the enemy, to cause it to disintegrate rather than waste his men on destroying it.
Patton did advocate mass marching fire (suppressive fire) but administered as part of a surprise assault. He advocated a version of it for tank advance through hedgerow territory and entry to urban areas. He cited research into marching fire in Sicily that showed its benefits. Bradley only ever understood Patton's results in August 1944 and not his methods. His books later often rubbished Patton who he disliked but had to put up with. This post of mine profoundly simplifies the radical nature of Patton's modus operandi but does support the above post. I think the same failings existed in 12th Army Group, so the Americans had company in the faulty tactics and training department.

 

Glad to hear that. It's always nice to discover someone else who comes to similar conclusions and more so getting the opportunity to learn from them too. I don't feel like it makes any of us particularly brilliant, it is more a case of taking a new look at the evidence (often evidence that has been there all along) without the intellectual blinders the established narrative imposes on us and then following where that evidence leads us.

Sounds very interesting. I will definitely check it out soon.

That's interesting. I knew that Patton was favorable towards marching fire and that was always a negative in my book, but now I see that perhaps I wasn't aware of the fuller context. In fact, that is the way DePuy saw it as well, valuable as long as it wasn't used in isolation (as was the case at the beginning of the Normandy campaign):

[Marching fire is] not a bad idea, assuming that you put it in the right context. They used marching fire as...the sole method of attack. What they should have done, of course, was position the heavy machine guns and light machine guns and even rifle companies, so as to gain total fire superiority with small arms as well as mortars and artillery, and then, during the assault, use marching fire, which would have maintained the fire superiority.​

I would note that in Balkoski's Beyond the Beachhead he also identifies the fundamental flaw in US Army doctrine and training prior to Overlord was the idea that infantry units could gain fire superiority over the enemy (in this case, the Germans) solely with their own units' weapons. The problem was that the Germans had so many more automatic weapons and when you get to the MG 42, with such a greater rate of fire that this just wasn't possible without adding other artillery or armor fires. It is a credit to the US Army that they did eventually figure things out to a greater or lesser extent, but that came after D-Day and the idea that they had rectified their doctrine prior to Overlord just does not stand up in face of the historical evidence.

The proposition that leaders like Bradley and Hodges were the best the US Army could come up with after the supposed winnowing out process of the Mediterranean campaign is laughable IMO.

 

I learned from your post and also really agree with this quote above from you. I have edited this post overnight and read Depuy for the first time. Thank you. From it, I picked out this quote on their initial grievous losses in the Normandy Bocage when attacking head on before they twigged:

"The way we cracked those positions was simply by finding a hole somewhere around the flank. Find a hole, get through that hole and get in their rear, and then the whole bloody thing would
collapse. Then you'd have them in the open. That's the kind of thing I wished we had learned during the two years we were training in the United States and during the three months we were training in England. I wish someone had told us that simple fact - don't attack them where they are strong, but try to find a weak spot and go through the weak spot."

It's a good job that one of the combatant sides in Ukraine has not apparently seized on this.

 

Hi,

Apologies, I'm short of time so this will be brief but:

Did you read my post in response? I'll post it up again as you didn't respond to my points:

Rather than stopping two panzer divisions, 18th Indian Infantry Brigade plus its supporting arms was overrun and dispersed by what was essentially a brigade group of exhausted, if veteran, German panzer troops. My point is not that I blame the troops or commanders of that Bde, they were left out in a vulnerable position which was only a reasonable deployment if the British had a well coordinated plan for reserves to move to their support. That wasn't the case and was a symptom of all that was wrong with the British Army at that point in the war. Too many wishy-washy deployments made that relied on levels of inter-formation coordination that just didn't exist.

Otherwise, I don't have a problem with the rest of that paragraph:

I mostly agree, although having the equipment and the training ground necessary to conduct significant large exercises (I'm thinking operational level not tactical here) without enormous constraints on their reality would certainly have helped. As is noted here, that simply wasn't the case:

I'd also agree with this:

But doctrine doesn't stand still. So the training that the British formations went through in the UK developed between the post-Dunkirk days and the pre-OVERLORD spring training rounds and would likely have been very different at all but the lowest levels. Battalions had different organic support weapons such as anti-tank guns, more mortars, more MMGs, etc. Signal equipment and vehicles would have been different. In 1940 there would have been a need for very little amphibious training but that became a core need once the Germans had overrun France.

I'll leave this here for now. I think my next post should really be about the causes to the delays to TORCH and the significant wake up that operation caused to assumptions about both amphibious training and for training more generally.

Regards

Tom

 

Is there any hint why they didn't get that training?

 

Sorry I missed this post somehow or I would have replied before.

True, 10th Pz is definitely at or near 100%, and I'm pretty sure that 6th Pz is not far behind. But even if they are over 100% that does not change the terrain in Normandy. Yes, armored divisions can be quite effective fighting defensively in such terrain, but offensively the hedgerows are going to be a major impediment to swift and concentrated offensive action. That is surely why Rundstedt's deployment plan does not have any of his mobile units, including the SS divisions, entering in the bocage area. In ground combat terrain matters. Yes, I admit, that works both ways, so see my last reply at the end of this post. I will note (again) in this part of the reply that if early on the Allies were drawn out into good tank country (which is what Rundstedt was counting on) then I do think they they would be in big trouble, but that is nowhere envisioned in the Sledgehammer concept.

All things taken into account I don't see that those 4 divisions (and over a period of days there could be and probably would be more, but the Allies would be building up too) constitute a greater problem than what the Allies handled at Salerno.

I always love this objection because it conjures up the specter of the Germans rushing in ground and air forces from elsewhere when in fact Germany is already stretched to the limit. That is why it takes weeks after 6th Army is surrounded at Stalingrad the next month for them to put together a relief force of just 1 full-strength Pz division (6th Pz, which under this scenario is stuck in France) and 1 understrength one.

Ok, you don't mention ground forces, but the principal is the same for air. There aren't these large numbers of Luftwaffe planes hanging around waiting to be redeployed. There are some in the Med. but not enough to really tip the balance in NW Europe and Hitler is surely going to want to keep some of them there. The one "swing" element of the GAF in the 2nd half of 1942 is Luftflotte 4, but even that has declined from 480 bombers (323 operational) in June to 232 (only 129 operational) in late September (Hayward, Stopped at Stalingrad, p. 195). Soviet naval units in the Black Sea, which during the summer had had to restrict their activities at sea to periods of darkness or poor visibility for fear of German air attacks, were, by the autumn of 1942, roaming the same waters with impunity at all hours and weather conditions (p. 178). Some German bomber units that attacked the Jubilee invasion force in August were decimated in just one day (they scored 0 bomb hits). I won't repeat here the dire situation the German SE fighter force was in at the time. The plan estimated a 7.5:1 Allied advantage in fighters at the beginning and never dropping below 3.5:1, but from other documents I see that they were planning on accumulating a reserve of fighters equivalent to 100% of the operational force available, and that does not count the 350 Mustang I's they had in storage in the UK. I would point out the half of the fighters in the Desert Air Force (but less than 200 total, I think), the one that Rommel described as so formidable in October 1942, consisted of P-40s, an aircraft decidedly inferior to the Mustang I.

I will also point out that even when it was not stormy there were often very cloudy conditions which would greatly hinder air operations (on both sides, of course) but regardless the planners were not taking any chances with the GAF and so called for unloading to take place mostly under cover of darkness. Troops dug in in the hedgerows are going to be awfully hard to target as well. Lastly, they were bringing lots of AA, both on land and floating.

Actually it mentions cruisers, but that is not the point. I am not maintaining that the Sledgehammer plan as it stood when it was cancelled is the be all and end all as far as operational planning, it merely represents a framework which shows the then current thinking on doctrine and the outlines the basic concept as well as providing lots of information on beach and tidal conditions, intelligence on enemy forces, etc. My premise is that the Western Allies commit something like all available resources that are not needed elsewhere (i.e., Western Desert, Guadalcanal) that could reasonably be employed. If they don't then Sledgehammer will likely fail.

But if the decision is made to go forward, why should they hold anything back? For a while Adm. King was arguing he didn't have many naval forces available for Torch but when the President pressed him he "discovered" the USN could commit 3 battleships, 3 heavy cruisers, 4 light cruisers and over 35 destroyers to the operation. That in itself represents pretty much all the firepower they would need even if you exclude Massachusetts and Cleveland which probably would not have been ready in time, plus maybe half of the destroyers, which would not have been needed. If you required more firepower there was always Task Force 1 that had been training intensively since the spring with a combined sixty 14" and sixteen 16" guns. These were all of the "newer" old battleships which meant their guns could fire high angle and had better protection than the Texas and New York BBs used in Torch. None of the battleships in TF1 participated in any combat operation until I think November 1943.

If by that you mean battleships, then you may or may not be correct. If it were a question of saving the invasion then why would they be any less willing to commit them for Sledgehammer than Avalanche (Salerno)? If anything the stakes are higher for the invasion to succeed. There is no way IMO the RN would let itself be seen as not taking some risks in that context. Also, if the USN sent BBs into the ENGLISH Channel I 1000% guarantee the RN would not allow even the suggestion that they were not willing to do so as well. In any event, I don't think BBs were really necessary, some mixture of heavy and light cruisers would more than suffice to provide the gunfire support needed, probably just what the USN committed for Torch.

I do not recall I ever rated them as "high" risk, but I will attempt to address them as follows, having taken the liberty to rearrange a little and combine what seemed to me to be related or redundant objections...

There are multiple reasons to believe that a rapid response would be delayed: the critical fuel situation, marrying up troops and equipment arriving separately by rail and road, bombing of rail lines and facilities, German preconceptions that made them fear followup landings reinforced by Allied deception, Rundstedt's deployment plan that I mentioned earlier, differences between commanders (especially Rundstedt and Hitler, but possibly Hauser as well), and, as you say, forces tied down to occupy the Free Zone or at least defend against any perceived threat from there (yes, the Vichy Army is quite weak, but you can't beat something with nothing and its only about 20 miles from the demarcation line to the Atlantic port of Bordeaux where Hitler might imagine they could link up with Allied reinforcements arriving by sea). Most of these by themselves are enough to impose significant delays and there is reason to believe that most would come into play to some extent.

The need for ammunition is generally greater for offensive operations than for defensive one. Regardless, the 500 tons per division per day easily allows for the average of 200 tons of ammo US divisions received in Normandy in July 1944 when they were fighting a high intensity offensive operation (fuel is the other big component and we are looking at less than 75 tons per division per day). So they are needing an average of maybe 3500 tons/day over the first 10 days, or 35,000 tons total. So lets look at a scenario where Cherbourg is not captured for that period of time. At an average of 15 supply coasters a night unloading on the beaches per night with 200 tons each, the capacity planning envisions (the beaches had a room for 70 coasters and such discharges were common during Overlord) that is already 3,000 tons per day; there were 150 coasters available for this, so all that could all be pre-loaded. If 50 LCTs unload per night with 400 supply trucks with just 2 tons/truck that is another 800 tons per day. Add to that at least another 700 tons/day on average from vehicles brought over by the converted barges and you have over 4000 tons/day even with 10% losses. All of that is shore-to-shore, btw, so surely some would have landed ship-to-shore as well. You might throw in 100-200 tons a day flown in as well (presumably fuel and spare parts for fighters stationed there); remember you are starting the op with over 150 C-47s. In a pinch you can load 100-200 tons of cargo on the barges (of which they had more than 900) or 300-350 tons on an LCT.

Also, the plan does not even contemplate using any docks in Cherbourg but rather the beaches inside its breakwaters which were the first areas made available for discharge in 1944.

It will? How do you know that? This is another presumption that I hear from so many Sledgehammer skeptics, that it is a sure thing that Hitler would instantly divert everything possible to counter a landing. There is little doubt in my mind he will send air and perhaps ground reinforcements, but how much and how fast are open to question. He is adamant at the time that he does not want to bring anything over from the East because he saw that as the only way he can lose the war. I don't know what he would actually do but I know he will be on the horns of a major dilemma and that does not typically make for good decision making.

I feel adding German naval forces as a substantial threat to the operation is really grasping at straws. I don't doubt that light surface vessels and maybe a few U-boats will be able to sneak in and take out some ships, but that happened in almost all amphibious ops in the Mediterranean. I think it rarely if ever gets above nuisance level.

I don't see what is complicated about it. Drops on two landing zones during the day. If they land around Oct 5 it has to be during the day because there is not enough moonlight as I noted in an earlier post (to be fair in one I submitted after your own that I am responding to now) and as I also touched on in that post the navigation problem is so much easier than Torch, Husky or Overlord. For Torch they expected to navigate over hundreds of miles without radio navigation aids and for Husky the distances are not as long but you still are needing to cut loose from gliders near the coastline at night. Those are much more difficult tasks than what is expected for Sledgehammer.

The relevant coastal batteries are all in open emplacements of the type on either side of Dieppe, one of which was taken out by a single light mortar round and the other of which was suppressed for some time by a handful of Commandos sniping at it. Commando operations to take the batteries within range of Madeleine Beach were already part of the plan and in any event most of them are in areas close enough the the landing areas that they should be overrun within the first few hours of the operation, the first landings of which were to take place before first light. From the evidence I have the Germans did not have effective nighttime fire control for their coastal batteries there either.

I do readily concede this is a danger. I am constantly harping on the defensive value of the terrain, so that is going to help the Germans too. This is as close to a "high" risk as you get, I think. I do think if you take all of the factors together the odds are stacked in favor of success, but not overwhelmingly so I will admit. To be clear this is not a problem for the beach landing areas but in securing the neck of the peninsula, especially the western part. The air landing areas are also free of hedgerows, though there are some nearby in the landing zone near Lessay (which actually might make it even easier to see from the air). I am tempted to run over some scenarios to give some idea of the degree of risk, but again this post is pretty long, plus I have yet to do the long post on landing craft I have wanted to do for a while, so maybe later.

 

There are lots of things I don't feel knowledgeable enough (like all the logistics) to comment on. I feel one has to assume that the Germans would commit as much to counter Sledgehammer as they did to Torch i.e. reinforcing Tunisia, but how many were actually transported to Tunisia post-Torch, I'm not clear on. And it wasn't that many forces to begin with. It's funny though, in my opinion, to suggest Adolf "defend that ground and do not withdraw" Hitler would not want to react violently to an actual landing in France, whatever the situation in Russia. But supposing we grant the limitations on the availability of German forces to send, what was the Allied appreciation of that situation, because that seems much more relevant than the actual reality from the German POV.

Salerno vs Sledgehammer. I think you're right to point out that Salerno was very risky. But two points: (1) it came after about a year of successes which the Allies did not have under their belt in the summer of 1942 (2) there was a reasonable hope, as I understand it, that German forces would withdraw into the northern part of Italy.

I really have to wonder what was on the minds of British Home Forces when 8th Army kept botching operations against the Germans. My point being that I wonder how much confidence they had in their own troops to fight (say) an equal sized German force, considering how in Battleaxe, Crusader, and Gazala 8th Army had failed. (I know Crusader was a qualified victory, but when you consider the material advantage that 8th Army had started with, I don't think they did all that well.)

Finally, I just don't know I feel about the general idea of a landing in a limited area like the peninsula and staying there. If you can build up strength there, your enemy can too, and you have put a great big arrow on the map saying "Western Allies are here".

 

No, it is 100% sure even under the most favorable circumstances I can think of that the Germans will commit more divisions and get them there faster than they could ever hope to in Tunisia. The thing is the Allies can too. By mid-December the Anglo-Americans still only had around 32,000 troops in Tunisia, but I am saying they had the lift capacity to have some 50,000 on the Cotentin Peninsula on Sledgehammer's D-Day in early October, around 20-25k the next day and maybe 15k daily after that until they reach about 8 divisions at which point it would probably drop off a lot for some weeks.

I am not suggesting the he would not want to react violently. Actually, I am as sure as I can be of anything that he will want to. I was pushing back against the idea that he would necessarily drop everything else, everywhere else to give priority to the West.

Hitler 15 August 1942 (meeting with Speer, Keitel et al; topic of discussion, possible Second Front in the West): "There is only one combat front: the other fronts can only be defensive fronts with limited forces...for the sake of the war in the East [the combat front], the West must get by with limited forces." (underline in original)

So certainly he will hit back hard at an invasion, and certainly he will bring some resources back from elsewhere. I am only saying it is not certain how much and how fast he does so. In the short term he knows that ground troops from the Eastern Front will take over a week to get there so he will have to make do with what he has already has in France. The claim I was countering, however, related to air and naval power and to me with respect to the former it is uncertain how much and how fast he will bring in warplanes from elsewhere especially since the GAF is so worn down from intensive use all summer long. He might indeed decide to favor the West over everything else, I am just saying that it was going to be a major dilemma for him given what he thought at the time, so it is by no means a certainty.

Hitler had, when forced to make a difficult choice, often ended up implementing half-measures and it is possible in this case he might as well. Or, given that he thought that once he completely captured Stalingrad he could free up forces both to back up the Italian 8th Army on the Eastern Front, which he already saw as threatened (they would be decimated by Operation Little Saturn in mid-December, so he was not wrong about that) and also withdraw some divisions to the West to prepare them for his "Mesopotamian" fantasy the following spring (he was planning to restart his drive south through Baku and continue into Iran and Iraq) which would have the added benefit of bolstering his military posture in the West over the winter, and given the Red Army was clinging to a very narrow slice of the west bank of the Volga he might have thought that one last push would solve all his problems and give him the victory in Stalingrad he had just publicly promised to boot. He might then hope to take care of the Anglo-Americans in Normandy over the winter. I am pretty sure this solution would occur to him, but I am not at all sure what he would decide. My point, again, is that it is far from sure that he would automatically drop everything else immediately to concentrate on an invasion of the West.

The assessment in the late July Sledgehammer plan with respect to the German buildup is not too different from what I would expect if there is minimal delay in reacting, which, from a planning perspective is what you'd want to do, though there would certainly be efforts made to deceive the Germans so as to diminish and delay their response. I cannot say for sure if they would have succeeded (again, counterfactual) but they would certainly be pushing against on open door given German preconceptions.

I wasn't really trying to make that point, but on the other hand I do not deny there were some anxious moments in the opening days of the operation before the Allies were able to bring enough troops ashore to make further German efforts futile. As I pointed out before there is a moment when the US 36th ID, with just its remaining 7 infantry battalions is defending a 20-mile perimeter, about the same length as the neck of the Cotentin but where the Allies planned to have about 4 times the troop density on terrain more favorable to them and with better air support and logistics.

Yes, I agree that due to recent events the British high command was very discouraged about fighting the Germans. They could have taken some solace in the fact that they had stopped Rommel at El Alamein already by the time of the July meetings. Plus they could recall that Tobruk had held out against Rommel for many months in 1941 so that shows that it was far from impossible to hold a piece of ground defensively under the right circumstances. Yes, Tobruk had been a disaster more recently and naturally that would probably be the first thing they thought of, but the earlier experience there proved it was not impossible to hold a front against the Germans, especially if you were under the impression that Rommel was exceptionally talented. In any event, in the final analysis, the variable we are messing with here is the decision making. The premise is that the decision was made to go forward with Sledgehammer so doubts amongst certain leaders about doing so are sort of beside the point. If you want to insist that the British leadership could never have been convinced (as opposed to forced) to go forward with Sledgehammer I would have to agree with you.

In the short term there is definitely going to be the suspicion that it might be a diversion. I cannot say with certainty if that thought would significantly affect the speed and nature of a counterattack, but there is a good probability it would. Beyond that I don't see how that is fundamentally different from the German perspective from June 1944 except that in 1942 the main front will remain in the East because the fuel shortages I have described should only confirm in their minds that they must get the oilfields they started out the campaign to capture. Unless in some unforeseeable way Sledgehammer screws up the Soviet counteroffensive in November - which, of course, is a possibility when you are talking about counterfactuals, but logically by tying down more forces in the West and probably bringing some part of the GAF and maybe a division or two back from there it ought to have been more successful - then you are still going to have the months of extreme German vulnerability early in 1943 that I have described before (again, logically speaking, it ought to have been worse) so objectively it doesn't matter what the Germans have on their map.

 

I really don't see the RN risking any battleships in the Channel in 1942. The overall war situation was entirely different from 1943 let alone 1944. In 1942 Britain needed every battleship it could get and could not afford to lose any when it still had the prospect of fighting the capital ships of Germany, Italy & Japan. Looking more closely:-

In the last 4 months of 1942:-
KGV class:- minimum 2 required in Home Fleet to counter Tirpitz. The last to complete, Howe, was still working up. As the only modern capital ships too valuable to risk in the Channel. When deployed for Torch, Husky & Avalanche they went to the covering forces not for gunfire support.
Renown:- her speed makes her too valuable to risk in shore bombardment in confined waters. Much more useful as a carrier escort. Too lightly armoured to be caught as a sitting duck.

In the Far East, the old battleships form the core of the Eastern Fleet defending the vital Indian Ocean convoy routes to the Middle & Far East. That was tying up Revenge, Resolution, Warspite & Valiant plus previously Ramilles (under repair after being torpedoed during Operation Ironclad) & Royal Sovereign (sent to the USA in Aug for a much needed refit).

Queen Elizabeth herself was in the USA repairing the damage from those pesky Italian human torpedoes in Dec 1941. Malaya was released from duty holding the fort (due to a lack of anything better) with Force H in Sept again for a much needed refit (and that despite Operation Torch coming up. Not completed until Jan 1943).

That only leaves Nelson & Rodney. As the only 16" battleships in the fleet they are still too valuable to lose. Note that in 1943 when the crisis at Salerno arose, this pair plus Warspite & Valiant had been released to return to Britain. It was the latter pair that were detached to go to the beachhead and, perhaps not coincidentally, were the pair that had been involved in the bombardment of Calabria as part of Operation Baytown.

When battleships were released from Home Waters in 1942/43 for Operations Torch, Husky & Avalanche they went not as bombardment ships but as cover against the appearance of the Italian Fleet, being attached to Force H. The surrender of the Italian Fleet allowed the release of the Nelrods, Warspite & Valiant for home (until the crisis) while the 2 KGVs escorted the Italian Fleet to Alexandria.

The monitor Roberts would have been available with its two 15" guns. the only other available monitor was in the IO.

For Normandy all the bombarding warships took part in extensive gunnery training exercises involving liason with ship borne & airborne spotters. I don't believe that that was being done in 1942 which might well have affected the effectiveness of gunfire support.

In late 1942, even cruisers were in short supply. Taking account to ships allocated for training and in repair there were only about 50 British & Commonwealth cruisers in service covering the world from the Pacific (6 ships), through the Indian Ocean & South Atlantic (many older ships and heavies covering convoy routes) to the Med & Home Waters. For Torch they gathered up 11, only 3 of which seem to have been involved in any bombardment work, and including 3 dedicated AA cruisers. Their main role was the protection of the assault convoys from outside naval interference along with other heavy units. For Husky 14 took part with about half providing bombardment support. For Avalanche 11 took part with initially 3 providing gunfire support to be joined by another 4 when the crisis hit. But the cruiser's role is seen as more one of force protection than gunfire support in these operations.

I came across an interesting comment about gunfire support in 1942 while perusing the DANFS entry for USS Texas in relation to Operation Torch:-

" At that point in the war, amphibious warfare doctrine was still embryonic; and many did not recognize the value of a pre-landing bombardment. Instead, the Army insisted upon attempting surprise. Texas finally entered the fray early in the afternoon when the Army requested her to destroy an ammunition dump near Port Lyautey. For the next week, she contented herself with cruising up and down the Moroccan coast delivering similar, specific, call-fire missions. Thus, unlike later operations, she expended only 273 rounds of 14-inch and 6 rounds of 5-inch."

Your comment about King is odd, unless of course it was just King being King! Most of the warships he "discovered" were already under the command of the Atlantic Fleet for the whole of 1942! They had been patrolling the western Atlantic during that time and escorting convoys. Some had even joined the Home Fleet during spring / summer 1942. Ranger had been delivering aircraft to West Africa. So it wasn't as if they had to be dug out of reserve.

By the way the reason that TF1 had stayed in training on the US west coast and Hawaii area during 1942 was not a lack of desire by Nimitz to use it more effectively but because there was insufficient tanker support to keep them down in the South Pacific alongside all the other ships already present down there. See Beans Bullets and Black Oil for the problems the Pacific Fleet logistics people had to cope with in 1942.
Beans, Bullets, and Black Oil

Whether however that really meant that they could have been made available in the Atlantic is another matter. They formed a useful backstop to protect the US West Coast and the route to the South Pacific should the Japanese do something unexpected or should the losses in the South Pacific mean that they needed redeployed in whole or in part.

 

Sorry, I had meant to say thanks for posting the reference, which seems to be titled: "Report on visits to U.S. Army training establishments by Brigadier G.K. Bourne, attached Offices of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, Washington." That does sound interesting and the snippet contradicts much of what other commentators had to say later that year. It would be interesting to understand which formations they were visiting. I'll see if I can dig up anything on Brigadier Bourne.

No I didn't mention ground forces, but I would point to the air reinforcements that the Germans managed to find for a much more peripheral and non-essential strategic operation from their perspective. These snippets are from Hinsley, vol. 2:

p.487: '...the speed and scale of the [Axis] intervention exceeded Allied expectations'...'AI had not foreseen the extent to which, as a result of the preparedness of the Axis to weaken all other fronts in its efforts to hold Tunisia' its predictions of air opposition to TORCH were quickly shown to have been overly optimistic.
',,,by 12 December, [1942] after a stream of transfers from North Norway and Russia as well as from Western Europe, no less than 850 German aircraft were operating against the Allied [TORCH] forces, out of a total of 1,220 in the Mediterranean theatre as a whole...'

p.488: 'AI, armed with the plentiful evidence from Enigma of its low morale, fatigue and general ineffectiveness in the Libyan and eastern Mediterranean theatre, had reckoned in August that the GAF would be 'at a low ebb': 'it will be a force without depth and in need of a period for re-equipment; difficulty will be experienced in making forces available for sustained operations in a new theatre of war'. But the Germans overcame this difficulty and the fighting quality displayed by the GAF during the Tunisian campaign was of a high order.'

There are more details of which units moved and from where - all of which, and possibly more, could and would have been done to counter an October 1942 Allied landing in NW Europe.

One point about the opposition that TORCH faced at sea (from both air and naval opposition) is that the Germans were deceived (or deceived themselves perhaps) into thinking that the noticeable concentrations of shipping moving into Gibraltar etc were concentrating in order to launch another major convoy operation to Malta. At one point, all of the U boats which were lined up in front of the TORCH convoys in western Mediterranean were shifted eastwards - perhaps to form a tighter patrol line across the likely convoy route to Malta and east of where the TORCH convoys turned south towards the North African coast.

It is unlikely that a SLEDGEHAMMER concentration of shipping in southern England would have escaped detection especially given German penetration of some British convoy codes at this time and also because as Hinsley reveals:

p.476: 'During the first three weeks of October [1942] the GAF flew a daily reconnaissance of the [British] south coast ports.'

Given that the Germans were moving GAF specialised anti-shipping units from Norway to the Mediterranean even before they were certain of the purpose of the TORCH concentrations at the eastern end of the Mediterranean it is highly likely that they would have reacted just as swiftly to evidence of major Allied shipping concentrations in south coast ports.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that the GAF would move lock stock and barrel to NW Europe but they are suggesting that given the actual German reinforcement of its air strength in the Mediterranean there would likely be heavy air opposition to SLEDGEHAMMER with all that entails for a vulnerable amphibious operation.

Regards

Tom

 

Thank you for illustrating so well what was wrong with Anglo-American strategy during much of WWII. If your mindset is not just to defend everything everywhere but to do so with multiple layers of redundancy (I mean what does having R-Class BBs in the Indian Ocean add to the mix that includes CVs, land based aircraft, including presumably on the recently captured Madagascar, submarines, cruisers and faster battleships? In my research I keep running into references about the necessity of keeping an American division in Northern Ireland. What on earth for?) and then see what is left over for offensive action then it is no surprise, even with the vast resources the US and Britain had at their disposal already in 1942, that there is so little left available for that. It is almost as if they set out to disprove Frederick the Great's dictum "he who defends everything, defends nothing", which is really no more than the concept of Schwerpunkt applied to defense. But the Western Allies had no Schwerpunkt and so they suffered the consequences of dispersion with under resourced campaigns all over the globe, not because the resources did not exist but because when their planners figured out what was left over after piling insurance policy upon insurance policy worldwide it was determined that only campaigns in remote parts of the world were possible. That, however, entailed a large burden on global logistics, especially since there were multiple such side-shows which further divided up the resources, which meant that even those campaigns were for a long time under resourced and so they stumbled along for long periods until eventually the Allies accumulated enough resources to prevail.

This was the main reason the Germans had enjoyed the success for so long. When they did something they generally went all in, even when it meant taking some measured risk elsewhere. That was Nimitz's approach at Midway, "calculated risk", and he reaped a brilliant victory. But why didn't he have Wasp at Midway too, or at Coral Sea? Because it had been sent to Scapa to cover for the British while they did their side show at Madagascar. Actually, why didn't he have not just 3 (incl. Wasp) but 5 carriers at Coral Sea? Because King and Roosevelt had their own little side show/publicity stunt. Yes, King had cruisers escorting convoys - doesn't that demonstrate just as much as your other examples for other naval vessels doing this or that someplace that they weren't available for Torch? No, because what they were doing was not essential and so they ended up indeed being available to support amphibious operations.

The Germans did eventually go too far when they invaded the USSR. Now it was time to make them pay by turning their two-front nightmare into a reality. You do that by concentrating all available resources on one operation. Luckily, they still had enough resources to keep two of the side shows going offensively (Western Desert and Guadalcanal) without detracting appreciably from what would have been the main effort. Luckily as well, they already had the largest concentration of air power, both in terms of bombers and fighters, already based right where they needed it. Same with electronic warfare, amphibious resources, ASW and minesweeping, etc.

Why do we even have principles such as concentration of effort, which on the face of them are blindingly obvious? Your post exemplifies exactly why because you can always find rationales to disperse your efforts. It usually takes discipline and at least some willingness to take calculated risks to focus on the most important or decisive thing.

If you start with a risk-adverse attitude you will never reap the benefits of bold action. I am not saying that Sledgehammer was so obviously the right decision that only a fool or a coward could be against it. Far from it. It did entail some risk, though, IMO the risks were not anywhere near as great as its opponents then and afterwards have claimed, and focusing solely on the risks (or exaggerating them) misses the huge benefits it promised both politically and militarily.

It also ignores the real risks of not doing Sledgehammer, the principal one being the loss of the Soviet Union either through military defeat or a the negotiation of a separate peace, a risk that trumps all others as both the British and Americans recognized at the time. This is looking at it from the perspective of the time. Looking at it retrospectively we see that the Western Allies 1) missed a golden opportunity to be established on the Continent at a uniquely vulnerable moment for Germany following their defeat at Stalingrad, and 2) felt compelled to commit themselves to a campaign that delayed the decisive cross-Channel invasion until the Germans had increased their combat power in the West many times over. Actually these are not totally retrospective in nature because Marshall definitely brought up the prospect of #2 and you could even say Eisenhower in very general terms is already in January 1942 anticipating #1 (I also believe you could get to #1 by certain evaluations by British authorities as well, but I would have to dig around to confirm my recollections about that are correct). The cost of #2 also involved the shedding of additional Allied blood.

As to some of your more specific points...

Pre-invasion bombardment is definitely part of US amphibious doctrine at the time, but it is not necessary in this case due to the weakness of German coastal defenses in the landing areas and I wasn't really thinking about that but rather using it in support of ground troops fighting off German counterattacks, like at Gela, Salerno and later in Normandy.

The older US BBs cannot be defending the West Coast of the US (which, by the way, has active air bases all along the coast - that is where many USAAF and Navy units were based while waiting to be deployed abroad - so again, they were redundant at best) and be in the South Pacific at the same time, so the former rationale does not hold water. I am quite aware that the reason often cited why TF1 did not deploy to the South Pacific was due to fuel limitations, but that could hardly be the case for deploying to the UK, and they need not have deployed all of them there either. In fact, as I said, I don't think any BBs were actually needed but their availability it is just illustrative of how much naval firepower was sitting on the sidelines.

For the RN I never was thinking of the KGV class battleships for the reasons you cite, but rather HMS Rodney that participated in Torch and I think even did a little shore bombardment at some point, and perhaps one or two of the older BBs with 8 x 15" guns. I definitely think Roberts should have been made available and what a monitor is doing in the Indian Ocean is beyond me since its sole purpose, I believe, is shore bombardment.