HWB is one of my favorite aspects of this project. I am eager to read his analyses during the next year. Which gets me thinking of the situation in the U.S.A. a year from now. In October 1941 congress is hotly debating whether merchant ships should be armed for self-defense against U-Boats. The military lacks sufficient aircraft to monitor the approaches to Hawaii, our main bastion in the Pacific. The army recently concluded war games in Louisiana that exposed serious deficiencies in the command structure. We are clearly not ready to get involved in a one front war, let alone a two-front war, Yet one year from now we will be in the preliminary stages Torch, the invasion of North Africa. If I didn’t know better (or "now better," as they say in Lincoln) I would say you can’t get there from here.
Torch was little better than a life-fire extension of the Louisiana war games. There were some hotheads who wanted us ashore in France a year from now. Even though the Wehrmacht was using France as “reserve depot” to train new divisions and refit burned-out divisions from the Eastern Front, I shudder to think what they would have done to the American army of 1942 in France.
Right now, as of October 19, 1941, our country is woefully unprepared for a war everybody must know will come sooner or later.
An interesting potential study here; the American people were faced with a great challenge right over the horizon, and yet we lacked the political will to do anything about it until it blew up in our faces. How do you think the current economic and fiscal situation is playing out? Same? Or different?
I agree with henkster in that TORCH was just Louisiana with real bullets. Our biggest failing right now is that we have generalship with a peacetime mentality. Though we are working in creating the arms in which to field an army, there really are not too many commanders who are actively preparing for war. General Short will be a good example of this. He is stationed in a volatile region but in reality he is riding out what even without being relieved would be his last tour before retirement. His head isn’t in the game and neither is many of the other commanders.
Despite Churchill’s ulterior motive to prevent the France landings in 1942, he was absolutely correct, as was Alan Brooke, that a landing at that point would have been disastrous. The U.S. soldier, and more importantly, the U.S. commanders needed North Africa to shake off the rust and weed out the incompetent and outmoded commanders in the field (with limited success). We are fortunate that in general, we were quick studies.