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World Battlefronts: Casting Continues

4 minute read
TIME

Generals, brigadiers and colonels hopped briskly to one side as imperturbable British painters dragged their ladders, pails and paintpots through the busy halls of London’s District Office Building. The painters set to work in a biggish, two-windowed room. First they covered the red-green-&-brown-speckled carpet with canvas, then slapped a coat of cream-colored paint on the walls and departed. Other workmen began moving in telephones and desks. Staff officers who took time to peek noted that there was ample floor space for a couple of comfortable chairs, ample wall space for outsize maps. The office from which General Dwight D. (“Ike”) Eisenhower will direct the invasion of Europe was almost ready.

Ike’s Team. Under Eisenhower, the invasion command is largely British. Wiry, brilliant Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder of Mediterranean air fame, is to be Deputy Supreme Commander—in effect the executive officer directing the entire massive campaign by land, sea and air. The Royal Navy’s Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay will be chief of Allied Naval Forces; the R.A.F.’s Air Chief Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, chief of Allied Tactical Air Forces.

Leigh-Mallory, a calm, strapping, 51-year-old six-footer, has been the R.A.F. fighter chief since 1942. As commander of R.A.F. No. 12 Fighter Group, he organized the offensives of 1941-42 which whittled away Germany’s onetime fighter superiority over western France, and directed the air support for the Dieppe raid in August 1942. Admiral Ramsay is a tough, slit-mouthed, energetic officer who well deserves his nickname “Dynamo,” pinned on him in 1940 after he had directed the almost-miraculous evacuation of Dunkirk (code name for which was “Operation Dynamo”).

General Eisenhower had evidently determined to go into western Europe with some of the men who worked with him in the south. But to those who remained behind he gave a heartening farewell: “Until we meet again in the heart of the enemy’s Continental stronghold I send godspeed and good luck to each of you along with the assurance of my lasting gratitude and admiration.”

One shift that surprised London military men will send Lieut. General Ira C. Eaker, commander of the U.S. Eighth Air Force, down to the Mediterranean to lead all Allied air operations in that theater, and bring Major General James H. Doolittle up as chief of the Eighth. Eaker, a crack officer with an unparalleled grasp of the problems of daylight precision bombing, had fought long and successfully for that American theory of air attack. Few of his friends could doubt that he must be deeply disappointed at departing now, just when he had built his air force to the point of wrecking key German industries, with billiards-shark precision. In their long-distance strategic operations, both Eaker and Doolittle will be under Lieut. General “Tooey” Spaatz, another American member of Eisenhower’s old Mediterranean team. A member of that team as yet unaccounted for is Air Vice Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham, the R.A.F.’s great expert in tactical bombing.

The operational chart for invasion was still far from complete. Gaps had been deliberately left, possibly to keep the enemy in the dark on some important matters of organization and relationship between commanders. Big question yet unanswered: Who will command U.S. ground forces in the attack from Britain?

Casting for the big show goes on for humble men who wear neither star nor pip. In the past two months British merchant seamen have been asked individually whether they wished to volunteer for the desperately dangerous job of running invasion supplies in to the shallow Continental shores aboard little coastwise freighters. Volunteering also meant giving up leave for the duration, plus the extra work of stevedoring their own ships. Its only tangible reward was $4 a week extra pay for seamen, $6 for officers.* By 1943’s end the men of Poet Laureate John Masefield’s “Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack, butting through the Channel in the mad March days” had given their answer. Fewer than 100 from the entire Merchant Navy had declined service, and all of these were medically unfit.

*Average pay and bonuses of U.S. able seamen on transatlantic duty: $2,990.

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