Desperate Venture Quotes

“It is not unreasonable to suspect that much was lost that could have been saved and that much additional grief and destruction were suffered because the invasion was not launched sooner. It is not unreasonable to conclude that for all its merits, the primary achievement of Operation Torch was to delay the moment when the Allies were able to break through Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, storm into Germany, and with the Soviets, go on to bring the most murderous war in history to a triumphant conclusion.”
― Norman Gelb, Desperate Venture: The Story of Operation Torch, the Allied Invasion of North Africa

“Eisenhower found the difficulties he faced “nerve-wracking. Ordinarily,” he later observed, “a commander is given, along with a general objective, a definite allocation of forces upon which to construct his strategical plan, supported by detailed tactical, organizational, and logistical programs. In this case the situation was vague, the amount of resources unknown, the final object indeterminate, and the only firm factor in the whole business our instructions to attack.”
― Norman Gelb, Desperate Venture: The Story of Operation Torch, the Allied Invasion of North Africa

“It seemed to Secretary of War Stimson that the Navy Department “frequently seemed to retire from the realm of logic into a dim religious world in which Neptune was God … and the United States Navy [was] the only true church.”
― Norman Gelb, Desperate Venture: The Story of Operation Torch, the Allied Invasion of North Africa

“Like a number of other senior American officers, he was convinced that British overall strategy was devised not so much to defeat Germany as to preserve the British Empire, which Americans, if they thought about it at all, generally considered an iniquitous anachronism.”
― Norman Gelb, Desperate Venture: The Story of Operation Torch, the Allied Invasion of North Africa