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Almost from the day America entered the war after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, U.S. military leaders wanted to fight Hitler by invading through France. It would be risky, but if it succeeded it would open the most direct route across Europe into the heart of Germany. Eisenhower was one of the earliest and most determined advocates. In March 1942, when he was chief of the War Department's Operations Division in Washington, he sent a memorandum on strategy to the austere, brilliant head of the U.S. Army, General George Marshall. It urged that "the principal target for our first major offensive should be Germany, to be attacked through Western Europe." Eisenhower pointed out that in order to pull together the troops, training, transport and weapons for such a huge effort, the British and American governments would have to commit themselves formally to a cross-Channel attack.
President Franklin Roosevelt approved and in April 1942 dispatched Marshall and presidential adviser Harry Hopkins to persuade Churchill in London. The great war leader of Britain and his generals certainly wanted the U.S. to defeat Germany first, before turning to Japan, and did not want to put off the Americans by disputing strategy. So the British agreed to the invasion of Europe as something they intended to do -- only not right away. With searing memories of the retreat to Dunkirk in 1940 and of horrifying losses at the Somme and Passchendaele in World War I, the British shrank from binding themselves to another all-out effort on the European mainland. They much preferred to attack the Germans around the periphery -- in the Mediterranean and southern Europe.
The eager American warriors were getting ahead of themselves. The Allies had neither the troops nor the landing craft needed to carry out Operation Sledgehammer or Roundup or the other code-named plans to invade France in 1942 or 1943. Yet to boost morale and reassure their voters, both Churchill and Roosevelt were determined to mount an offensive somewhere against the Germans before 1942 ended. They decided to invade North Africa to drive out the Italians and the German Afrika Korps, though Marshall and Eisenhower opposed the move as a diversion of resources.
Eisenhower, now a lieutenant general based in London, was chosen to command Operation Torch, which went ashore in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942. His forces then moved into Tunisia to link up with Montgomery's Eighth Army, freeing all North Africa from the Axis. By the time the U.S. persuaded Churchill to undertake a Normandy attack, Eisenhower had commanded two more seaborne invasions during 1943: Sicily and mainland Italy. They were sideshows in his eyes -- and the Italian campaign quickly bogged down into a bloody mile-by-mile struggle up the peninsula -- but they taught him a great deal about the complexities of such operations. Equally important, he and Generals Bradley and George Patton emerged from the North African and Italian battlefields as first-class combat leaders.