Dear Friends,
I’m expecting to write a little less here over the summer than I usually do. The main reason is that I’m putting a lot of energy into a research project connected with the North Africa campaign in 1942. I can’t imagine that many of you care/are thinking very much about this campaign — but you should! What I’ve been discovering is that that period, and specifically that campaign, is a real linchpin for the world that we find ourselves in now. What follows is a few impressions from this sort of random rabbithole of mine.
Best,
Sam
THE NORTH AFRICAN CAMPAIGN
The US found itself creating a massive war machine virtually overnight. Defense spending in 1940 was 1.7% of total GDP; by 1943, it was 32% and, by 1945, 37%. Or maybe to put those numbers even more starkly, as a share of the federal budget, defense spending was 17% in 1940, 69% in 1943, and just shy of 90% by 1945. In a real sense, we’ve never come back from that. Defense spending now is 12% of federal spending and nearly half of all discretionary spending. That transition — the creation of what Winston Churchill called America’s “mass produced armies” — is the baseline of post-war existence. It may be (speaking optimistically) what guarantees the security of the current world order; and it is the great unaddressed issue of American domestic politics. To a startling extent, that new system was soldered together within a few months in 1942 and took in all the personalities and assumptions of that period of time.
US commanders, dealing with the evident inexperience of their men during the initial North Africa battles, seemed instantly to conclude that peacetime training was insufficient; that some framework of ‘limited war’ was needed to maintain the sharpness of the armed forces. Patton in his memoir would specifically blame “the pacifists” of the inter-war period for World War II — i.e. for allowing things to get to such a point that only total war was possible.
North Africa was, if not exactly intentionally, an ideal instrument on which to practice limited war. American planners, somewhat naively, had preferred an immediate strike against France in 1942, from which Churchill and the British gently dissuaded them. North Africa (Operation Torch) turned out to be excellent practice for D-Day — an amphibious invasion launched at an enemy that was not the Germans (the somewhat-bewildered Vichy French in Morocco and Algeria found themselves facing one of the greatest armadas ever created) and with the explicit purpose of getting American troops “blooded”.
The US discovered the need for intelligence and covert ops. What Omar Bradley called “America’s long neglect of intelligence training” resulted in desperate improvisation — a reliance on a largely-Polish spy network in North Africa and on the machinations of the gentlemanly spy Robert Murphy, who cooked up an alternative power structure that was, even anything, even further to the right of Vichy. The OSS (the CIA’s predecessor) cut its teeth in North Africa, and the evident deficiencies of US intelligence led to an understanding that intelligence be an entity of its own, willing to engage in coups and conspiracies and separate from both civilian and military control.
The US found the value in allying with the local Fascist. Much of the more-hidden story of Torch is of the US (both the Army and the intelligence officer on the ground, Murphy) deciding that it could not trust a group of local freedom fighters. Instead, the US, as a military expediency, brokered a deal with Admiral Darlan, an arch-Vichyite, who had supported the Germans in an invasion of Iraq, had offered to declare war on Britain on Germany’s behalf, and had deported Jews to concentration camps. For months after Torch, Vichy legislation barring Jews from certain professions and imposing quotas in others remained in place in North Africa. Torch offers a picture of an army with a democratic vision — Eisenhower called his memoir of the war years Crusade in Europe and was sincerely animated by his hatred for Nazism — while at the same time aligning with a quasi-Fascistic local strongman under the theory that that was better for maintaining order.
The US found itself abruptly in an internationalist position, triangulating between France and Britain for post-war control of the third world. From very early in the Torch campaign there was abundant discussion about the value of bases — the possibility of denying strategic bases to the enemy and creating far-flung bases for oneself. From 1942, there is a short step to the present — the practice of leaving local regimes almost completely untouched while exercising might through an enclosed network of military bases.
There was a recognition of the might of the German armed forces — “one lesson we had to learn the hard way was the skill, ferocity, and speed of German counterattacks,” Eisenhower wrote — as well as the degree to which the entirety of German society had become a war machine. As an American POW, who observed Germans dragging a burning transport plane off a runway so as not to impede takeoffs before only then pulling wounded men out of the craft, put it, “People who fight a war like that will be tough to beat.”
The lesson that the US brass absorbed was that to beat Hitler you had to take in Hitler. By the end of the war, the US took that principle to an extreme with Operation Paperclip and the escape of top Nazis, but it permeated more deeply through the American military psyche of the period — the idea that, to defeat the dragon, you must become the dragon. It’s a highly tangled, highly ambiguous legacy, and, to a startling extent, we’re still living with it.