“General Smith was assigned to come up with a plan for the invasion of Western Europe using the forces we had available. That he has done and we are looking at the result now. I would venture to say that this is the best possible plan that could be made, using the forces available. The reason why it’s going to be a disaster anyway is that the forces committed to it are still grossly inadequate. What’s worse, anybody who looks at the plans, and we have to assume that the Germans will, sooner or later, will know that they are grossly inadequate. They’ll see it for what it is, a plan to land an occupation force
“So we need a bigger invasion force. You, yourself, said just a few minutes ago, that we’re tapped out. So the invasion is impossible.” It was a flat statement and Dewey’s voice was grave. He knew well the implications of what he was saying.
“We are tapped out, in the manpower department anyway. The 95 division force we have now is all we can support. Industrially, we can do a lot more. The truth is that our economy is barely half mobilized; our production can go a lot higher than present levels if we really need to. Of course, every time we crank economic mobilization up, we make the post-war demobilization crash worse. We’re heading for a pretty nasty post-war economic depression as it is. We’re walking a delicate line between the level of military mobilization needed to fight this war and the level of civilian margin needed to ameliorate that post-war crunch. So, the obvious requirement is to get more manpower.”
“Any ideas where from? Not the Russians surely?”
“No, Mr. President. The Russians really are tapped out on manpower. They can, just barely, support what they have. However, they’re not the only ally we have. There’s the Commonwealth as well. We’re using Canadian troops up in Kola but there’s a lot of the Commonwealth we haven’t started to exploit yet. There’s a lot of the British Army scattered around. We can consolidate that and make up a pretty decent force.”
“The
“Oh, we did Mister President. In fact, the British were planning a transatlantic invasion long before we were. They started their planning back in 1940 with the idea of combining a transatlantic “relief force” with a military rebellion against Halifax’s regime at home. The way they saw it, and I don’t think those plans were ever even remotely plausible, was that they were looking at a re-occupation with, at most, a few skirmishes on the side. I guess they thought that getting a suitably impressive force across the Atlantic would be enough to trump Halifax. In my opinion, doing that was the easy bit. Defending the UK once recaptured, from the German response would be hard. Our sources suggest that they had the whole operation planned for late 1942, or so they hoped. Anyway, we’ll never know. Their plans were forestalled by the German occupation. The forces in England, the RAF and the Army, shot their bolt holding the Germans off long enough for the Royal Navy to get out.
“In retrospect, I think The Great Escape was part of that plan. At the time, we saw it as a heroic gesture to keep the fleet out of the hands of the Germans. I think it’s equally likely that it was a key move in preparing for a re-invasion. The great problem the Commonwealth faced was that their invasion fleet would be very poorly escorted. If the Germans had spotted it, there would have been a massacre. So they had to get the RN out to screen the invasion convoys. The fact the Germans got in first was an unwanted complication, but it didn’t really change things. For several months after the occupation, all that was in England were the paratroopers and air landing troops who did the initial assault, some regular infantry and a few panzer and panzer-grenadier regiments who got either flown in or landed in the channel ports after they were secured. A Commonwealth-only invasion was practical even if it wasn’t likely to succeed. That still left the re-invasion threat untouched. Of course, we messed everything up by getting into the war and bringing the German submarines down on our east coast. By the time they’d been cleared, the window of opportunity had gone.
“Be that as it may, the Commonwealth did a lot of planning on how to move troops around. It all proved irrelevant. Keeping the Russians in the war, holding Kola, maintaining the Arctic convoy supply line, they’re taking up most of their effort now. They’re still planning things of course, but it’s more from force of habit than anything else. They were planning to move five corps over the Atlantic, how they’d manage it don’t ask me. Apparently, it was two Canadian Corps, two British Corps and the ANZAC. Three divisions each. Then, the two Canadian Corps went to Kola. They replaced one of those corps with a mixed formation, mostly South African with other contingents thrown in. That still leaves twelve divisions and they’ve got plans to move them as well, without bouncing off our resources. Those twelve divisions as part of the second wave following the Marines ashore would be priceless. A 21-division follow-up looks like a serious invasion.”
“How come these forces have never been mentioned before? There’s something seriously wrong going on here.” President Dewey was drumming his fingers with irritation.
“Partly it’s us, Sir. To be honest I don’t think the planners take the Commonwealth forces very seriously. Losers and all that. But it’s also a reaction to how the rest of the world sees us. We’re a nation of immigrant misfits. In the final analysis as a people, we’re made up of everybody nobody else wanted. The very fact we exist is a reproach to their ruling elites. The fact we outperform them across the board is a deadly insult to their whole belief system. So, our unofficial foreign policy with regards to the rest of the world is, ‘they see us, they insult us, we kick their ass’. As a result, we’ve got into the habit of not caring very much what they think of us. We just wander off and do what we want, or what we think we have to do. If they want to come along for the ride, fine, but we really don’t care very much.”
President Dewey was trying not to laugh. “That’s not how they teach our history in school.”
“Mister President, in my experience, history is very rarely how it gets written up in the history books.”
“I can believe that. You know there is a problem here. Governments get so set in their ways they forget they live in a narrow, self-validating clique. We could use an outside viewpoint sometimes. How advanced are these Commonwealth plans?”
“Pretty well developed although they are intensely theoretical documents. Nobody in the Commonwealth believes that they are going to stage an invasion on their own, not now. They’ve got a lot of the groundwork though. Of course, if we bring in a Commonwealth force this size, it’s going to throw the whole Overlord-Downfall question open again. The Commonwealth forces will insist on making the first strike at England, possibly with Ireland as a first step but definitely aimed at the U.K. Even if they go along with hitting France first, they’ll want a commitment to strike at the U.K. later. I’d say no more than 60 days after hitting France. That’s going to be as bad as our present plans. Another reason why we like going it alone, alliances are an entanglement.”
“No foreign entanglements rings a bell. If there are Commonwealth troops out there we can get our hands on, what about the French? They had colonial interests too.”
“Bit of a different case. They had troops, quite a few of them, in Indo-China but they got hammered during the 1941 war with Thailand and then when the Japanese occupied the rest of Indo-China. They have troops in North Africa but nothing like the resources the Commonwealth has. Anyway, the French are likely to be as demanding as the Commonwealth, they’ll demand they hit France first and go no further. They don’t like the British right now and with good reason. They were still fighting hard when Halifax folded in 1940. I’m not saying they had a chance of winning but they were still hanging on.
When Halifax signed his Armistice, they were left high and dry. If that hadn’t happened they’d probably have got better surrender terms. It was just like with the police here, the first person to fold gets the good deal.”
“Stuyvesant, I know you’re an industrialist, not a general, but I want your honest opinion. Do you think an opposed transatlantic invasion of Europe is really possible?”
Stuyvesant leaned back in his seat, appearing to calculate the balance of forces while an ironic thought passed through his mind.
“No, Sir. It is not. We cannot transport enough troops, support them well enough or keep them fighting once they are ashore. We’ll end up with a lodgment that we are hard pushed to hold; a Russian Front in miniature. The Germans have interior lines and that’s always bad news. We can’t get at them without using the B-36. If we try to do so using that aircraft we trade away our trump card. The Big One has to succeed, Sir. It has to shatter the German ability to resist and it has to destroy their ability to move troops around. We have to deprive Germany of its interior lines of communication so that the Russian and European fronts are disconnected. Only then can we invade with a hope of success. That’s assuming Germany keeps fighting after The Big One. All I can hope for is that the Germans see sense and surrender.
