Posted on 08/08/2013 6:40:45 AM PDT by cutty
The two most ardent boosters of the Normandy invasion were Stalin and Harry Hopkins
...
Churchill famously urged that the advance on Germany continue from already-won bases in Italy and elsewhere in south-central Europe.
Stalin’s demand for the big U.S.-British push in northern France, however, prevailed. According to the tally of one peeved letter to the editor in the New York Times, this would put the Allies on track to open their ninth front.
Of course, in order to gather sufficient forces for the June 1944 D-Day invasion, men and equipment, particularly landing craft, had to be withdrawn from the European continent – in Italy – to reinvade the European continent – in France.
In his memoir, Calculated Risk, Gen. Mark Clark, commander of U.S. forces in Italy, explains how gutting his forces in Italy in the months before D-Day stalled Allied progress against German forces. (Italy had already surrendered.) Meanwhile, the disappearance of Allied men and materiel from the battlefield completely mystified the Germans.
For weeks, Clark writes, Allied counterintelligence “was catching enemy agents who had orders to find out 'where in hell' were various Allied divisions that were being sent to France.” They couldn’t believe the Allies weren’t dealing them the death blow they had expected.
Italy... “was the correct place in which to deploy our main forces and the objective should be the Valley of the Po. In no other area could we so well threaten the whole German structure including France, the Balkans and the Reich itself."
"Here also our air would be closer to vital objectives in Germany,” he explained. The commander went on recommend “operations in the Aegean”: "From here the Balkans could be kept aflame, Ploesti would be threatened and the Dardanelles might be opened.”
That commander’s name was Dwight D. Eisenhower.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Correctomundo. That soft underbelly had this teeny weeny thing called the Alps in the way of our objective: Germany. It's hard enough to push an army through those mountain passes when they are not defended. Put a few troops and 88's in the way and it takes a couple of years.
Maybe the allies were experiencing a shortage of elephants.
bookmark
However, if there had been a war, the politicians would probably have surrendered. Truman admired Stalin and said he reminded him of Democrat Party boss Tom Pendergast, Truman’s mentor and father figure. The State Department and the rest of the government in 1945 an 1946 was full of Communists who were far more loyal to the Communist party and the Soviet Union than to the United States.
From Anzio until V-E Day, the Itlay campaign was a hard slog; tough battles against experienced German troops, defending rugged terrain. Without opening a second front in Normandy (and later, in southern France), Hitler could have easily focused his troops and resources in Italy, slowing our advance even further and inflicting many more casualties.
It’s also worth noting that General Clark was among our least capable commanders. His forces achieved near-total surprise at Anzio, but failed to exploit their opening; a jeep patrol made it to the outskirts of Rome a few days after the landing, but the local commander, General John Lucas, preferred to dig in. That gave the German commander time to rush thousands of troops to Anzio and pin us inside the the beachhead for months.
After the breakout at Anzio, Clark pushed on to Rome instead of turning to disrupt the German’s interior lines. This allowed large numbers of German troops to escape and redeploy to the next major defensive line, where they bloodied Allied troops again.
There is no compelling evidence that Clark would have made better use of additional resources. Perhaps the writer is inferring that if Italy were the “only show” Clark would have been replaced by men like Patton or Bradley. There may be some truth in that, but regardless of who was in command, they would have faced the difficult challenges of fighting their way up the Italian boot.
And here’s another inconvenient fact: to reach Germany from Italy, you have to advance across the Alps and through Austria. Not exactly tank country. The Italians and Austrians fought in those mountains for years during World War I, and we might have encountered a similar, bloody stalemate. Meanwhile, Stalin’s tank divisions would have advanced well past Berlin and wound up with much of Western Europe.
If I’m not mistake, the author of this article had a similar offering earlier in the week, criticizing FDR for not re-inforcing the Philippines after our entry into World War II. With most of our Pacific Fleet on the bottom of Pearl Harbor, we lacked the naval power to send reinforcements across the Pacific to the Philippines and defend the sea lanes from superior Japanese forces.
Incidentally, the situation was made worse by General MacArthur’s calculation that Tokyo wouldn’t attack until April 1942 at the earliest; as a result, defensive preparations were way behind and his staff was on a “peacetime” schedule up until the first bombs fell.
FDR was no saint; there is compelling evidence that he deliberately left our fleet exposed at Pearl Harbor, trying to bait the Japanese and give us an entry into the war. He denied critical intelligence to his commanders in Hawaii and thousands of pages of intel documents from that period remain sealed. FDR even fired a PACFLT commander (Admiral J.O. Richardson), who demanded the fleet return to its home base in San Diego, realizing it was unprepared for war and dangerously positioned at Pearl.
But suggesting that Italy should have been the “only” ground campaign in Europe is ridiculous, as are the claims about the Philippines. As conservatives, we often criticize liberals for re-writing history to satisfy a particular agenda. These attempts are no better and they reflect a complete misunderstanding of the military situation at the time.
There was more to it than appeasing the British.
It was a huge appeasement to Stalin, who was demanding a second front.
Fighting in N.Africa, Sicily, and Italy gave the U.S. experience that it badly needed, before putting whole armies ashore in northern France.
Opening up airbases in the south forced a dilution of German air defenses, which was good for the 8th AF.
The amphibious capability built up in the Med forced the Germans to keep significant garrisons in Greece and Yugoslavia, where they were tied down to the end of the war.
The American people also wanted in the fight. Buying war bonds and living without would have been harder for most to pallet, had we simply waited two years to do anything. And remember, we had decided on “Europe First”, so it would have been very unpalletable to do nothing in Europe and very little against Japan for two years. Although our stockpiles in England would have built up faster without the other campaigns, we would not have had air supremacy by the summer of 1943, nor the levels of equipment needed. Most of what we used in ‘44 was built in ‘43 and ‘44.
Albert Speer (who probably as much as anyone had an inside straight to the Nazi situation) in May 1944 concluded that a real danger was the possibility of the Allies destroying all the Rhine bridges in one day.
In his memoirs he writes: “In May 29, 1944, some ten days later, I wrote to Jodl in some agitation:
‘I am tormented by the thought that someday all the bridges over the Rhine will be destroyed. According to my observations of the density of the bombings recently, it should be possible for the enemy to do this. What would the situation be if the enemy, after cutting off all traffic to the armies in the occupied western territories, did not carry out his landings at the Atlantic Wall, but on the North Sea coast in Germany? such a landing would probably be practicable, since he already possess absolute air superiority which is surely the prime prerequisite for a successful landing on the north German coastal area. At any rate his casualties would certainly be less by such an approach than by a direct assault on the Atlantic Wall.’
In Germany itself we had scarcely any troop units at our disposal. If the airports at Hamburg and Bremen could be taken by parachute units and the ports of these cities be seized by small forces, invasion armies debarking from ships would, I feared, meet no resistance and would be occupying Berlin and all of Germany within a few days. Meanwhile, the three armies in the West would be cut off by the Rhine and the army groups in the East tied down in heavy defensive battles, in any case they were too far away to be able to intervene in time.”
MacArthur might have thought of doing something like that, but he was elsewhere.
It was partly naivety but it was mostly treason. Communists had infiltrated the U.S. government and for many their loyalties were not to the United States but to the Communist Party and the Soviet Union.
As for feeling guilty about the Russians bearing the most brutal brunt of WWII the Russian people suffered far more when the NYT was regularly writing stories about how happy the people were under the starvation and slaughter of the Communists.
The people who bore the most brutal brunt of the war were not the Russian people but the Polish people. Read about the battle of Warsaw and how the Soviet Army sat back and watched the Polish resistance fight the Germans. Poland suffered by far the most casualties proportionate to their population.
Even if the Soviet Union had signed another agreement with Germany late in the war, the allies still would have easily defeated Germany. The German cities were being bombed day and night, German industry was destroyed and the German Army was short on supplies and close to starvation.
Yeah no kidding. If they enemy was EXPECTING those divisions to attack, then they were READY for them to attack. If we Trying to push from northern Italy into France or Germany would have been HARD. Very hard. Has anyone successfully invaded across that boarder except Hannibal and some Vandals?
In one of the many documentaries I have seen, one episode about the Italian campaign was called "Tough Old Gut", which was a quote from one of the GIs that suffered through it.
Elsewhere on this thread, some mentioned the incompetence of Gen. Mark Clark. John Huston was asked to do a documentary on one battle, and did a scathing report, which upset the higher-ups, who tried to suppress it. It's on YouTube and is called "The Battle of San Pietro"
That was my guess...
Well, one of the non-what if scenarios was that Churchill made the mistake of revealing that he thought we'd have to fight the Russians sooner or later - and the English people unceremoniously booted him from office.
So much for thanks for saving the country.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwnMAet72Zc
This is ludicrous. Ms. West’s rewriting of events in World War Two wrecks her credibility on other issues.
FDR was our first communist president.
The other attack points were bombarded for several hours. Not so with Omaha. Fact. Most of the German pillboxes and such were still intact..
FDR was our first communist president.
That’s for sure.
What’s your take on George Marshall? I have mixed feelings. Good for the Marshall Plan, bad on China.
You don't why that happened, so you just assume "treachery" without investigating.
Because, apparently, your baseline assumption is that highly complex war plans always unfold precisely as hoped for and if they don't then there must have been a conspiracy.
Have you heard of a general named Napoleon Bonaparte?
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