Brigadier General Charles "Casey" Brower, Dean of Faculty at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), spoke at the Library on November 12th, 2002 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of "Operation TORCH," the first major Allied amphibious counterattack against Germany in North Africa during World War II. Brigadier General Brower is a graduate of the United States Military Academy, the Naval War College, and holds a Ph.D. in Diplomatic and Strategic History from the University of Pennsylvania. He has served in a variety of positions in the United States Army, including Army Aide to President Ronald Reagan, and has received many decorations including the Distinguished Service Medal and the Bronze Star Medal for Valor. In addition, Brigadier General Brower is the author of World War II in Europe: The Final Year (St. Martin's Press in association with the Roosevelt Study Center, 1998).

"The Commander-in-Chief and TORCH"
Charles F. Brower

The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library,
Hyde Park, New York
12 November 2002

The invasion, the Joint Chiefs told the President on the eve of an important off-year election, would be a distraction from the established strategy. It would dissipate American efforts against the most important enemy center of gravity and likely prolong the war and thus strain the patience of the American people for seeing it through to completion. Its proximity to the off-year election prompted distasteful questions from the opposition party about whether the military operation was designed to distract the public's attention from other presidential problems. While the president and his close ally the British prime minister were of like mind about the invasion, others strongly counseled caution or called for focusing attention elsewhere. The invasion would be a serious mistake one influential Army general urged publicly. "Our strategic priorities must be kept in order."

Culled from the newspapers and commentary over the past month, these are likely words familiar to most Americans thoughtfully considering the implications of President George Bush's proposed invasion of Iraq in the pursuit of toppling Saddam Hussein from power.

Remarkably, virtually the same words characterized the strategic debate within the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt over the decision to invade North Africa-Operation TORCH-made by FDR on 22 July and conducted on 8 November 1942, sixty years ago last Friday. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall strongly opposed the decision to attack not America's mortal enemy, Nazi Germany, but its oldest ally, France, fearing it would too long delay the early, massive cross-channel attack that he and the other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff believed to be the key to the defeat of Germany. His planners talked darkly of the dangers of "periphery-pecking" and "scatterization," His chief planner, Brigadier General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who would later be named to command Operation TORCH, termed FDR's decision to invade North Africa "the blackest day in history." "We've got to go to Europe and fight," Ike recorded in his diary, "and we've got to quit wasting resources all over the world, and worse, wasting time. We've got to begin slugging with air at West Europe, to be followed by a land attack as soon as possible." Even after the president's decision on 22 July, Marshall continued to consider the TORCH decision not final well into August, hoping to be rescued by what he called the "vicissitudes of war," and only finally committing his enormous will to the operation late that month. Indeed, on 6 August he solemnly assured Secretary of War Henry Stimson, himself another doubter, that he and his staff would not permit the North African landings to be conducted if it seemed clearly to be headed for disaster. And, finally, as a shrewd politician, FDR recognized the domestic political value of an invasion before the crucial 1942 November congressional elections. "When I went in to brief him on the TORCH planning," Marshall recalled later, "the president held up his hands in an attitude of prayer and said, 'Please make it before Election Day.' "

* * * * *

The broad strokes of the TORCH landings and subsequent operations are well known. At dawn on 8 November 1942, American soldiers waded through the surf of a series of widely separated beaches from Safi and Casablanca in French Morocco's Atlantic coast to the Algerian cities of Oran and Algiers. Three Anglo-American task forces--comprising in the largest amphibious operation to that point in the history of warfare--landed almost simultaneously on six different beaches separated by as much as 800 miles.

The Casablanca invasion force, numbering 38,000 men and commanded by Major General George S. Patton, Jr., sailed from Norfolk, the longest expeditionary effort to that point in American military history. The other two invasion forces sailed from Britain. Major General Lloyd Fredendall commanded Center Task Force comprised of nearly 41,000 men (37,100 Americans and 3,600 British) against Oran. Eastern Task Force against Algiers was largely a British affair with 45,000 British troops and 10,000 Americans, but in order to give the illusion that the invasion of French Northwest Africa was an American affair, an American, Major General Charles Ryder, commanded it. Once Algiers was secured, however, British Lieutenant General Kenneth A. N. Anderson would take over. Lieutenant General Dwight D. Eisenhower had overall command of the Allied expeditionary forces.

The first operational objective of TORCH was the occupation of Tunisia, particularly Tunis, to prevent Axis reinforcement and re-supply of their forces in Libya. This would allow the Allies to crush Axis forces in North Africa between the TORCH forces and the British Eighth Army advancing from the east from Egypt. The second objective was the build-up of a force in French Morocco to strike into Spanish Morocco, if necessary, to protect the Straits of Gibraltar should Spain renounce its neutrality and join the Axis or should Axis forces invade Spain to take Gibraltar.

The invasion caught the Axis by surprise. French forces loyal to the Vichy government did fight the invaders until a cease-fire could be arranged. While there were casualties, it did provide useful training for the green U.S. troops. After build-up and consolidation Anderson's First Army drove east from Oran and Algiers to occupy Tunisia and cut German lines of communication, while Patton's Casablanca force and units from Oran linked up to establish the striking force in French Morocco to protect Gibraltar.

German leader Adolf Hitler responded to the landings by ordering the immediate occupation of Vichy France. He also rushed troops to Tunisia. On 10 November, two German regiments arrived in Tunisia; they were followed by other German and also Italian reinforcements, including tank units.

Allied troops had advanced to a position 25 miles southwest of Tunis by 25 November, however German forces in Tunisia, commanded by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and Lieutenant General Jurgen von Arnim, stabilized the front along the western border of Tunisia by the end of the year. Rommel then badly mauled the poorly dispersed American II Corps in the battle of the Kasserine Pass in February. German command problems and British pressure from General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery's Eighth Army arriving from Egypt prevented German exploitation of the victory and drew the Germans east and away from the Americans to their ultimate defeat. In May the campaign for North Africa ended with the surrender of 250,000 Axis troops and the littoral firmly in Allied hands.

Forces in being have a way of creating their own strategy, and the presence of a large Anglo-American force in North Africa created enormous pressure for the continuation of a Mediterranean strategy. Marshall's call for a 1943 cross-channel attack, presented during the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, fell prey to Churchill's persuasive arguments to Roosevelt that Sicily should be the "great prize" for 1943. Knocking Italy from the Axis ranks, opening the Mediterranean to Allied shipping, and better positioning Allied air forces for the combined bomber offensive against Germany were gains too lucrative to resist. Moreover, the redeployment of forces to Britain for a cross-channel attack could cost the Allies the initiative that had so recently been wrestled from the Nazis.

The result, the subsequent Allied invasions of Sicily in July 1943 and the Italian mainland in September, seemed to confirm Marshall's warning that TORCH would inevitably lead to further Mediterranean operations away from the main theater of operations; would mean a postponement of the cross channel attack until 1944 at the earliest; and would risk dangerously lengthening the European war, with Japan still dangerously unattended to.

What Marshall knew, or perhaps only sensed, in the TORCH debate of the summer of 1942 was that landings in North Africa would lead to great Anglo-American disputes between the principle of opportunism and long-range commitment, between a war of attrition and a war of mass and concentration on the Continent. Great political and colonial prizes in the eastern Mediterranean would always beckon the British and forestall the early return to the Continent the Americans coveted so much.

* * * * *

Which all raises the question as to whether in overruling his military advisers and siding with Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff, FDR had fallen prey to the prime minister's considerable powers of persuasion and embraced the British strategy of attrition and encirclement to the detriment of an American sledgehammer blow in France. Had British brains enlisted American brawn in the service of the British Empire's interests? Was the strategic interplay between FDR and Churchill, as Bernard Brodie has put it, "a most interesting contest between British supporters of the Clausewitzian ideal of keeping political aims always at the forefront of strategic consideration, and American naivete?

Just what does the TORCH decision reveal about FDR the grand strategist?

The answer is, quite a bit, and most of it a quite ringing endorsement of Franklin D. Roosevelt's strategic sophistication. Let me spend the remainder of my talk illustrating this theme.

First, there is the question as to just what was the agreed upon American strategy for the defeat of Germany. The Japanese attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 and the subsequent declaration of war on the United States by Germany thrust the United States into a global and total war. At the hurriedly-called Arcadia Conference in Washington two weeks later, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their military chiefs of staff reaffirmed the strategic decision to defeat Germany first and agreed upon the general strategic concept for victory in Europe.

The five-phased Arcadia Strategy involved the mobilization and build-up of Allied forces and resources; the maintenance and extension of Allied lines of communications; the erosion of Axis strength through a strategic air campaign; the isolation of Axis powers by "closing the ring" around Germany; and the eventual invasion of the European continent and the final destruction of Germany. This strategic framework largely describes the course of American military involvement in the European Theater of World War II.

Although Roosevelt, Churchill, and their military chiefs agreed on the broad strokes of the ARCADIA strategy, they disagreed fundamentally on the key issue of the timing and nature of the Allied return to the continent. In this debate, the British and the Americans were influenced by their experiences in World War I. Dominated by the shadows of the Somme and Passchendaele, Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff feared a premature return to the continent and instead favored operations in the Mediterranean to close the ring around Germany. The Joint Chiefs of Staff led by Marshall had drawn a different conclusion from World War I, deducing that only when the large American Expeditionary Forces arrived in France had the war been won. To the JCS, a large-scale, direct cross-channel attack at the earliest opportunity was the strategic key to victory. An early second front in Europe promised the best aid to the Soviet Union, which had been carrying the brunt of the war against the Wehrmacht, the earliest defeat of Germany, and the speediest way to get on with the next great task of defeating Japan.

The disparity between German and Allied strength in France (both in terms of Wehrmacht divisions and a Luftwaffe advantage that approached six to one), British reluctance, and Roosevelt's ambivalence (shaped greatly by Churchill's arguments) largely precluded a cross-channel attack in 1942. In July, when the British indicated that they would veto a 1942 cross-channel attack and had reservations about even a 1943 attack, Marshall and the JCS were outraged and suspicious.

Should the United States agree to invade North Africa? Did the British really want to invade the continent in 1943? Marshall reviewed the bidding for the JCS: the North African operation would be "expensive and ineffectual," however a cross-channel attack would be an impossibility without "full aggressive British support." He then proposed a momentous change in the Germany First strategy: "If the British position must be accepted, the US should turn to the Pacific for decisive action against Japan." This "Pacific Alternative," as he termed it, would tend to concentrate rather than scatter US forces; would be highly popular throughout the US whose citizens hungered to revenge Pearl Harbor; would have the full support of Admiral King and the Navy; and next to the cross-channel attack would be the operation that would have the greatest effect towards relieving the Russians.

Quickly endorses by the Navy, the Pacific Alternative was presented to FDR, who at the time was vacationing in Hyde Park. Marshall's internal memoranda suggest that he was probably bluffing, that his aim was to enlist the president to his cause of forcing the British into acceptance of the cross-channel attack in 1943. If so, he clearly miscalculated the president's strategic grasp and his awareness of the American civil-military relationship.

FDR immediately telephoned Marshall to ask him and Admiral King to prepare a full exposition of what he termed "your Pacific Ocean alternative." By that afternoon he wanted sent to him by plane "a detailed comprehensive outline of plans, including estimated time and overall totals of ships, planes and ground forces," a listing of any proposed withdrawals from the Atlantic, and a summary of the effect of the plan on the defense of the Soviet Union and the Middle East. The president knew of course that no such plan existed.

Having made his point, a day later FDR administered the coup de grace: "My impression," he wrote in a famous document now prominently displayed here in the Library, "is that it is exactly what Germany hoped the United States would do after Pearl Harbor. Secondly, it does not in fact provide use of American troops in fighting except in a lot of islands whose occupation will not affect the world situation this year or next. Third, it does not help Russia or The Near East. Therefore it is disapproved as of the present."

What is most significant about this most remarkable document is found at its very end, in its signature, where the president had scrawled "Roosevelt, C in C." Commander in Chief. This is only time FDR was been known to use this stark reference to his Constitutional powers in his correspondence with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Its meaning could not have been missed. And Marshall and the Joint Chiefs understood.

[Parenthetically, you may have noted in press accounts the recent decision by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to reserve the title "commander-in-chief" for the president and to discontinue its use, as well as the acronym CINC, by those four-star generals who command the nine unified commands such as CENTCOM. My understanding is that in this case the Secretary of Defense, like FDR, was both directly and symbolically asserting the central prerogative of American civil-military relations: the subordination of the military to civilian control. The title has meaning and responsibility.]

FDR then directed Marshall and King to go to London and "as a matter of urgency" reach a decision with the British within a week of their arrival as to "the immediate objective of US forces fighting Germans in 1942." While not in so many words an explicit order to invade North Africa, from Marshall's perspective North Africa was "the least harmful diversion." It included some positive advantages, especially in terms of shipping savings of over two hundred ships per month if convoys could proceed through the Suez and Mediterranean rather than around the Cape of Good Hope. Such logistical factors had global implications.

What we see in this, perhaps the formative, strategic decision of the war - after all, the timing and sequence of the remaining elements of the strategy for the defeat of Germany follow in a pretty direct line from TORCH - what we see, is FDR ad War Lord, with the levers of military power surely and comfortably in his grasp. Much has been made of Kent Roberts Greenfield's assertion that FDR only rarely and cautiously interfered with the JCS, never overruling them again after the TORCH decision. But rather than evidence of a president disassociated from strategy-making, perhaps this fact is better understood in terms of Sherlock Holmes' classic story of the dog that didn't bark. The Commander-in-Chief did not have to overrule his military advisors because they recognized and appreciated the strategic sophistication of his judgment and avoided putting themselves into positions where they would be overruled.

Examining FDR's motives underpinning the urgency for getting Americans fighting Germans in 1942 provides additional insight into Roosevelt as grand strategist.

It is well known that cardinal strategic principle guiding Anglo-American war planners was to defeat Germany, the strongest Axis Power, first. But opinion polls in the United States showed that Americans were interested more in beating the Japanese than the Germans and Italians, an attitude clearly reflected on Capitol Hill. Winning a peripheral victory in North Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean or the Middle East might be good for the British Empire, but it was clearly not hastening the final victory in Europe and it was definitely delaying the comeback fight in the Pacific for which the American public was clamoring. It was only by a considerable intellectual effort that Americans had been persuaded that Germany not Japan was the most dangerous enemy, Secretary of War Stimson reminded Churchill. "The enemy whom the American people really hated, if they hated anyone, was Japan which had dealt them the foul blow." From the perspective of most Americans, therefore, the Mediterranean road was not the shortest way to victory, and Marshall and the Joint Chiefs believed it would be even slower that it ultimately proved to be. This specter of a long, plodding, costly war that would stretch out for years to come while testing the patience of the American people of a long tortuous approach that would stretch out for years haunted Marshall and the Chiefs and prompted their fierce arguments for an early cross-channel attack. "A democracy," Marshall told his biographer Forrest Pogue after the war, "cannot fight a Seven Years War."

The great British theorist of war, B.H. Liddell Hart, has written that democratic strategists have less freedom of action than their totalitarian counterparts: "Dependent upon the support and confidence of his employers, he has to work on a narrower margin of cost and time than the absolute strategist, and is more pressed for quick profits. Whatever the ultimate prospects he cannot afford to postpone dividends too long."

It seems to me that FDR's awareness of the need to devise a strategy that delivered incremental dividends to sustain the nation's investment of blood and treasure helps us to better understand his rationale for overruling Marshall and opting for the North African invasions in 1942.

FDR instinctively appreciated the imperative need to arrest the public's pull to the Pacific, for he believed that the defeat of Japan did not mean the defeat of Germany and that American concentration against Japan in 1942 or 1943 would increase the chance of a complete German domination of Europe and greatly complicate the final task of defeating Germany. On the other hand, he believed that holding Germany in 1942 or 1943 meant the probable, eventual defeat of Germany, and that Germany's defeat would mean the defeat of Japan in short order afterwards. "The necessities of the case call for action in 1942-not 1943," FDR told his military advisers. "I regard it as essential that active operations be conducted against Germany in 1942."

FDR also believed that continued prolonged inaction against Germany until 1943 as the Allies geared up for a cross-channel attack could create enough congressional and domestic pressure to force a shift of strategy toward the Pacific. To sustain support for the Germany First strategy, FDR worried about "finding a place where the soldiers thought they could fight" and concluded that only bloodying American soldiers in combat against the Germans would solve the problem.

Marshall later recalled that he learned an important lesson from the debate over TORCH: "The leader in a democracy has to keep the people entertained. (This may seem like the wrong word, but it conveys the thought.) The people demanded action. We couldn't wait to be completely ready. Churchill was always getting into sideshows and if we had gone as far as he did we would have never gotten out. But I could see that the president had to have something."

Others in the Joint Chiefs, casting an eye toward the November off-year elections, saw more crass political purposes motivating FDR's TORCH decision. Even the stilted bureaucratic style of the JCS minutes of the meeting following the president's decision fails to fully obscure their sentiments and resigned air: "There was an acceptance that apparently our political system would require major operations this year in Africa."

But Clausewitz reminds us that policy must be the guiding intelligence for war and that purely military considerations cannot be determinant in strategic calculations. Marshall may have been right that a 1943 invasion of Europe, made impossible by TORCH, might have shortened the war-though evidence is very strong that a 1943 attack would have been a badly premature and risky venture. Moreover, there remains the question of whether American strategists could have successfully resisted the powerful pull of the Pacific suction pump if major operations were delayed against Germany well into 1943.

As the Commander-in-Chief, FDR understood well that political considerations-especially the nature of his postwar relationship with Great Britain and the Soviet Union and the leadership role he envisioned for the United States in continuing that Grand Alliance into the postwar world and careful attention to considerations of national morale, the will and temper of the American people-must take priority over strictly military considerations. If he failed to arrest the public pressure to turn to the Pacific, if the United States left its European allies and turned to the Pacific, how could FDR hope to position the United States to lead in the postwar world?

These grand strategic political considerations weighed on the president's mind and guided his decisions. Partisan political benefits were to be viewed as a bonus, not as a principal objective. Recall that when military considerations led Eisenhower to set the date of the landings on 8 November, five days after the midterm elections, FDR remained mute. When Steve Early, FDR's press secretary, heard the announcement of the invasion five days after the Democrats had lost 44 seats in the House and 9 in the Senate, he exclaimed: "Jesus Christ! Why couldn't the Army have dome this before the election!" The Commander-in-Chief understood, however.

Nine months later in August 1944, after a successful Normandy invasion and breakout and the German army thought to have been mortally wounded, FDR could not resist crowing a bit to Marshall. "Just between ourselves (a phase we historians know cannot be realistic), if I had not considered the European and African fields of action in their broadest geographic sense, you and I know we would not be in North Africa today-in fact we would not landed in either Africa or Europe." Marshall did not respond. In fact, he never changed his mind about TORCH. But Eisenhower later acknowledged that it was probably the correct decision. The choice to go to North Africa rather than France in 1942 was "the great decision of the European war."

That it was, and one made by a grand strategist par excellence, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Commander-in-Chief.

Thank you for inviting me back to the Hudson River Valley. It has been an honor for me to help to commemorate the 60th anniversary of TORCH.

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