Monte Cassino The Hardest-Fought Battle of World War II

1 The Casablanca Conference and the Invasion of Sicily On 14 January 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill met in the newly liberated city of Casablanca in Morocco. In the East, the ring had closed around Stalingrad, and the Western Allied leaders now debated their next steps. With Churchill in the lavish surroundings of the Villa Mirador on the outskirts of the city was Gen. Sir Harold Alexander, later to be overall Allied commander at Cassino, whose "easy, smiling grace," Churchill wrote, "won all hearts." Harold Macmillan, then the British resident minister in North Africa, wrote of Churchill, "I have never seen him in finer form. He ate and drank enormously all the time, settled huge problems . . ." Officially, all were in agreement: With the campaign in Tunisia taking longer than expected, the cross-Channel invasion would be delayed until 1944. Once German resistance in North Africa had been ended, an invasion of Sicily would follow. If successful, this would give the Allies control of the Mediterranean, reopen the Gibraltar-Suez shipping lane and, they hoped, knock Italy out of the war. Behind the outward shows of unity, however, lurked serious disagreements about strategy. In fact, the Casablanca Conference saw the stormiest negotiations ever to occur between the Western Allies. The Americans, observing the military dictum that an attacker should go the shortest route to his objective with the greatest strength he can muster, were deeply suspicious of further delays to the invasion of France. The staunchest holder of this line was Gen. George Marshall, the US Army chief of staff and Roosevelt's right-hand man as far as running the war was concerned. In his view the Mediterranean was a sideshow and an unnecessary drain on manpower and resources that could be better employed by returning immediately to England and then heading via the shortest route to Berlin. Churchill though, like all the British, haunted by the ghosts of the Western Front a generation earlier, was determined to delay the battle in northern France until success was far more assured. He didn't think that moment had come, and also had other motives for pushing forward in the Mediterranean. Traditionally a British concern because of the route to India, Churchill was also intent on "setting the Balkans alight"--exploiting the resistance to Nazi occupation that had already tied down vital German divisions and aiming to cut supplies of oil and other products essential to Germany's war machine. He was even far-sighted enough to wish to get Western Allied soldiers into Central Europe and especially Greece before the Red Army arrived. Exasperated by British reluctance to proceed full-steam-ahead with plans for the cross-Channel invasion, the Americans were suspicious that Churchill's Mediterranean ambitions were motivated by imperial interests. There had been tension between Britain and America between the wars, including fierce exchanges over Britain's economic policy of Imperial Preference, which damaged US trade, and the American leadership could be absolutely sure of its people's deeply held anticolonialism. For Churchill, though, the empire was not up for discussion. But at Casablanca the British, much to their surprise, got their way, and after ten days of heated negotiation a compromise was reached that prepared the invasion of Sicily. This, as will be seen, led almost inadvertently to the major struggle in Italy, and the Americans retained the impression that they had been duped, or "led down the garden path" as far as Southern Europe was concerned. The ramifications of the Casablanca Conference were to affect the whole of the Italian campaign. To a great extent, at the highest level the Americans were unwilling participants in Churchill's "Mediterranean adventure." This made the southern theater a low priority for supplies and manpower, and also fed theParker, Matthew is the author of 'Monte Cassino The Hardest-Fought Battle of World War II', published 2004 under ISBN 9780385509855 and ISBN 0385509855.