The Forgotten Story of Operation Anvil

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/opinion/the-forgotten-story-of-operation-anvil.html

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Winston Churchill once quipped that George C. Marshall, the famed American general who served as Army chief of staff during World War II, was part of the “stupidest strategic team ever seen.” The cause of the British prime minister’s ire? Operation Anvil (later renamed Dragoon), the Allied invasion of southern France that began 75 years ago Thursday. Today that operation, which historians consider one of the most successful amphibious assaults in history, is largely forgotten, overshadowed by the D-Day invasion, which took place a few months earlier and on the opposite side of France.

But Anvil is worth remembering not just for its sophisticated planning. While the British adamantly opposed the operation, the Soviets just as adamantly supported it. When President Roosevelt seemed to side with the Russian dictator, Joseph Stalin, over Churchill, the trans-Atlantic alliance hit its low point.

The idea behind Operation Anvil emerged in mid-1943 as one of many potential operations against Continental Europe. It solidified in late November of that year, when Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met for the first time in Tehran, to determine the war’s strategic course in 1944. They agreed on simultaneous offensives in the summer, with Operation Bagration, an enormous Soviet operation, along the Eastern Front and Operation Overlord, the official code name for D-Day, in northern France.

But Stalin, who had been demanding that Britain and the United States open a Western Front against the Germans for months, believed that an invasion through southern France was the best way to augment Overlord. American planners responded with Anvil, which would cut up from the French Mediterranean coast along the Rhone Valley, toward southern Germany. The Americans liked the idea because it would open a new supply route into Europe, and because it would catch the Germans in a classic military pincer movement.

Churchill preferred to add more troops to the fight in Italy, where Britain had most of its fighting power in Europe. But Stalin, who believed that a dual invasion of France would put German forces under severe pressure, sided with the Americans. Churchill’s concerns were soon sidelined; the overall Allied planning group, the Combined Chiefs of Staff, determined that Operations Anvil and Overlord would “be the two supreme operations of 1944.” It was a high point of Allied collaboration.

But the planning for Anvil quickly derailed. Other battles, like the hastily arranged Allied invasion at Anzio, Italy, in January 1944, and the accumulating mountain of supplies for Overlord, diverted the planners’ attention from Anvil. For a time, it looked like Churchill might get his wish, by default — and, indeed, the Allied High Command officially canceled it that spring. But Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, and the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, desperately wanted a second point of entry for supplies once the invasion of France was underway. Gen. Jacob Devers, the deputy commander for the Mediterranean Theater, kept the planning group for Anvil alive.

After the success of D-Day in June 1944, the high command relented, and Anvil was back on — and so was the fight between the Americans and British. Churchill utilized the entirety of his lexicon to argue for its cancellation. With the postwar order in mind, the prime minister claimed that going ahead with Anvil, and thereby drawing more Germans away from the Eastern Front, meant that Stalin could push deeper and faster into Central Europe.

Roosevelt was unmoved. He claimed he could not agree to cancel the operation without first consulting Stalin. Eisenhower also refused Churchill’s arguments, stating that he would cancel the operation for military but not political reasons. Exasperated, Churchill went to Eisenhower on Aug. 9, six days before the operation was set to begin, and threatened to “lay down the mantle of my high office” if Eisenhower did not call it off. In internal memos, later unclassified, Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff — Britain’s military planning body — considered breaking off cooperation with the Americans in order to pursue their own operations in the Mediterranean.

Churchill never followed through, and Anvil — which the Allies had renamed Dragoon at the last minute — turned out to be the Allies’ most successful amphibious assault in the European Theater of Operations. On the first day, out of 94,000 soldiers, 95 Americans were killed and 385 wounded; while in Overlord, which landed 156,000 soldiers on the first day, 2,000 Americans were killed.

Things proceeded quickly: French Army B (later the First French Army), under Gen. Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, captured Marseille and Toulon on Aug. 28, a month ahead of schedule. The American Seventh Army, under Gen. Alexander Patch, mauled the German 19th Army at Montélimar, forcing the Germans to retreat to the Franco-German border by the end of September. Eisenhower got his wish, and then some — not only did Anvil/Dragoon open a new supply route, but its rapidly advancing forces provided a new, powerful right flank in the Allies’ final drive into Germany.

Churchill never relented; even after the war, he insisted that the troops and resources would have been better used for a drive into the Balkans to prevent the Red Army from getting there first. As the Cold War set in, it was easy to see his point — which is one reason many postwar historians played down the Anvil/Dragoons significance. Too successful to be called a mistake, it was written off as a footnote.

But Anvil/Dragoon was clearly significant, and not just for military history. It shows that for all their cultural and historical sympathies, the Americans and British — and Roosevelt and Churchill in particular — had different visions and concerns regarding the postwar order. Roosevelt wanted to win the war as soon as possible, and believed that he and his Allies could work out equitable spheres of influence later; Churchill distrusted Stalin, and was willing to distort wartime planning to block Soviet advances into Europe.

The operation also demonstrates the messy complexity of international diplomacy. No matter how strong an alliance, individual countries are still going to do what’s in their best interest, even if it means appearing to undermine those ties. American leaders sided with Stalin to the detriment of the “special relationship” between the United States and Britain; today, President Trump’s overtures to North Korea have put American allies in South Korea and Japan at unease. Whether the tradeoff is a good idea remains to be seen — but it is not unprecedented or out of the ordinary.

In June, world leaders joined thousands of people in France to mark the 75th anniversary of D-Day. In contrast, vanishingly few people know that Operation Anvil/Dragoon happened. Yet it’s worth pausing, on its anniversary, to consider its significance as “one of the two supreme operations of 1944.”

Cameron Zinsou (@cgzinsou) is a doctoral candidate in history at Mississippi State University. His dissertation, “Occupied: The Civilian Experience in Montélimar, 1939-1945,” received the Allan R. Millet Dissertation Research Fellowship in 2017 from the Society for Military History.

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