1943 - ROUNDUP
The notion of a British attack across the Channel could have had little reality and no urgency during the days when the German armies were in the flood tide of their initial victories on the Continent. Yet the British Joint Planners before the end of 1941 had drawn up an invasion plan. They called it ROUNDUP, a name suitably reflecting the concept of an operation in the final phase of the war against only token resistance. ROUNDUP was a plan for an operation with very small resources and bore little relation to the attack against Normandy in 1944. Nevertheless it was a beginning and some of its ideas persisted far into the OVERLORD planning period.
ROUNDUP was planned to exploit German deterioration. As a condition for the invasion, it was assumed that the Germans had abandoned hope for victory, and were withdrawing their occupation forces to concentrate on the defense of the Reich. The purpose of ROUNDUP was to disrupt that orderly withdrawal. British forces would assault west and east of Le Havre on beaches from Deauville to Dieppe. The object would be initially to dominate an area between Calais and the Seine 75 to 100 miles deep. The invasion forces would then push north, take Antwerp and proceed into Germany across the Meuse River north of Liége. Total forces to be used were 6 1/3 infantry divisions, 6 armored divisions, 6 army tank brigades, and supporting troops. Preliminary bombardment to soften the coast defenses would require three naval vessels, including one capita ship. The diffuse, small-scale landings and the tiny dimensions of the total force at once underlined the basic condition of enemy weakness set for the operations, and reflected the military poverty of the British at the time.
The 1941 ROUNDUP was not taken very seriously.
In March 1942, the Operations Division of the War Department (OPD) began work on an outline plan for a full-scale invasion of the European continent in 1943. It was to be projected as the basis for the deployment of forces and as a guide for strategy. The War Department and General Marshall were convinced that the main US-British ground offensive should be undertaken against northwest Europe. They rejected the Mediterranean areas suggested by Roosevelt because commitment of US troops there would be strategically defensive. Although the conquest of North Africa would break Axis control of the Mediterranean and prevent an Axis move through West Africa, the victory would not in itself be decisive and could not be exploited for further decisive action against Germany.
On 02 April 1942 General Marshall gave President Roosevelt the War Department's outline plan for a cross-Channel attack in 1943. The operation was conceived in three phases: a preparatory phase, the cross-Channel movement and seizure of bridgeheads between Le Havre and Boulogne, and, finally, consolidation and expansion of the bridgehead. Logistics set the earliest possible date for the beginning of phase two at 1 April 1943, except under emergency conditions. The preparatory phase would begin at once with the organization, arming, and overseas movement of the necessary forces. The main attack in the spring of 1943 was planned to employ 48 divisions supported by 5,800 combat aircraft. Landings would take place between Etretat north of Le Havre and Cap Gris Nez with the object of seizing the lower valley of the Somme and the high ground forming the watersheds of the Seine-Somme river system. Two main assaults were planned, on either side of the mouth of the Somme. The bridgeheads would be expanded to the southwest in order to seize Le Havre and the line of the Seine River.
The events between 1 April and the end of July 1942 produced, from the point of view of the US War Department, a disturbing shift in Allied strategy. The April 1942 decision to concentrate on a build-up in the United Kingdom for a cross-Channel invasion in 1943 was supplanted in July by the agreement to ship US and British forces into the Mediterranean to invade North Africa. The 1943 ROUNDUP, approved by acclamation in April 1942 as the first object of combined strategy in Europe, in July was laid aside in favor of extended preparatory and peripheral operations designed as prelude to a cross-Channel invasion of uncertain date.
By the middle of June 1942 the planners had developed a new appreciation and outline plan for ROUNDUP to be mounted in the spring of 1943. The plan was accepted by the Combined Commanders and submitted to the British Chiefs of Staff. It did not go into tactical details and was limited in scope to the establishment of bridgeheads including necessary airfields and port areas. The approach was cautious and the tactical idea quite different from that which produced OVERLORD. If our invasion is to succeed," the planners wrote, "we must endeavor to disperse the enemy's mobile reserves on land and in the air. At the same time we must avoid such action as will allow the enemy to destroy isolated parts of our land forces in detail. It follows, therefore, that while we must endeavor to launch assaults on as wide a front as possible, the size of each assault and the rate of subsequent development must, if possible, be sufficient to meet the anticipated rate of enemy reinforcement in each area . . ." How to dissipate the enemy's defense by a diffuse attack and at the same time be strong at each widely separated point was not fully explained.
The plan to make three "almost" simultaneous assaults in the Pas-de-Calais and on both sides of the Seine would leave a gap of some 10 miles between the northern and southern bridgeheads. In addition, subsidiary assaults were to be devised to lead to the early capture of Cherbourg and the Channel Islands.
President Roosevelt's decision on 30 July 1942 to go ahead with TORCH meant the indefinite postponement of ROUNDUP. That much was clear. It was not clear what effect the decision would have on grand strategy. In September 1942 Churchill outlined his conception of future strategy to the President. He was considering two possibilities after the assumed success of TORCH: attack into the "underbelly" by invasion of Sardinia, Sicily, or even Italy, and attack on Norway with the idea of giving more direct aid to Russia. ROUNDUP, he understood, was definitely off for 1943, but there still remained the possibility of an emergency cross-Channel operation and he believed that all the arguments advanced for SLEDGEHAMMER in 1942 would be even more valid in 1943-44.
Dieppe seems in general to have impressed planners with the hardness of the enemy's fortified shell and the consequent need for concentrating the greatest possible weight in the initial assault in order to crack it. Whether as a direct result of Dieppe or not, ROUNDUP planning in the winter of 1942-43 took a new turn. It had hitherto been assumed that attacks against the French coast should be widely dispersed in order to prevent the enemy from concentrating on the destruction of any one beachhead. In November 1942, General Barker and Maj. Gen. J.A. Sinclair, chief British planner, started on another tack. In examining the requirements for a suitable assault area for a major operation, they premised their study on the principle of concentration. Abandoning the ROUNDUP idea of many separate regimental and commando assaults, they assumed one main landing in an area capable of development into a lodgment for the whole Allied invasion force.
The North African invasion, launched on 8 November 1942, met almost immediate success and raised with new urgency the question which the July decisions had left unanswered: What next?
When the Casablanca Conference opened on 12 January 1943 the Allies for the first time felt themselves able to choose the time and place for carrying the war to the enemy. Rommel had been decisively beaten in North Africa. Although the fighting in Tunisia continued, it was clearly only a matter of time before the entire North African shore would be cleared. The Russians were already on the offensive after stopping the Germans in Stalingrad. Generaloberst Friedrich Paulus with more than 250,000 Germans was encircled and helpless before the city; the attempt to relieve him had failed. In the meantime the Russians had launched two other offensives to clear the Don Basin. In the Pacific, Japanese expansion had definitely been checked. The land and sea battles of Guadalcanal had both been won, although in January the island was still not entirely cleared. In the six months since the dark days of July Allied chances for victory had improved remarkably throughout the world.
The great weakness in the Allied position was a paucity of resources. Despite the large war potential of the United States, the troops, shipping, supplies, and material actually on hand at the beginning of 1943 were sufficient only for relatively small-scale offensive operations in one theater. If the prospects for a successful ROUNDUP in the summer were dubious, was it not better to concentrate on the Mediterranean where immediate operations offering a good chance of success were possible? Churchill had no doubt that this was the correct strategy.
There were perhaps twenty-one divisions that the Western Allies could hope to land in France in 1943. The argument on the relative futility of trying to influence the course of the land battle in Europe was lent considerable cogency by Molotov's prior request to General Marshall for the commitment in "the second front" of sufficient troops to draw off forty divisions from the Eastern Front. This was ludicrously beyond the capacity of the Western Allies at that time. Even if a landing on the Continent were feasible, it was likely to be much more costly than an assault in the Mediterranean.
Casablanca focused attention on 1943 and concluded with a statement that the operations envisaged in 1943 were designed to bring about the defeat of Germany in that year. For the British in May 1943, the next logical operation was a follow-up in the Mediterranean of the invasion of Sicily, which was scheduled for July 1943. The British Chiefs of Staff contended that Mediterranean operations were not only the most important immediate objective but that they were also essential in order to create conditions which would permit the mounting of ROUNDUP in the spring of 1944. In General Brooke's opinion, without further Mediterranean operations, ROUNDUP would not be possible before 1945 or 1946.
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