The gist of this article seems to be that the Allies should have chosen to attack the Nazis in the place that the enemy was most expecting and had prepared for.
Breitbart is a good site for current events, but it isn't quite up to snuff on its military history.
The entire effort in the Med, that whole soft underbelly thing, was done to benefit the British in maintaining it’s empire in the post war era.
The American idea was to end the war rapidly as possible. The British insisted on sideshows designed to help them maintain their position in the postwar era.
Thank god we didn’t do it the British way.
I think France would have gone communist if we hadn’t put De Gaulle in power there. And I’m not sure we could have done it without the D-Day invasion.
While capturing Italy first would have given the Allies an advantage in the air, there is no way they could have moved the necessary number of tanks across the Alps to complete the ground war.
“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.”
Myopia. Its actually the other way around. Italy sucked up supplies, landing craft, aircraft, soldiers, etc. Ike thought without the Mediterranean theater looking so large, the landings in France and a straight drive into Germany could have happened as much as a year earlier.
The British soldiers were first class. But their leaders prolonged the war. Market Garden is another example. To placate Monty, that failed Holland attempt at an end run stripped Patton’s army and stopped them for months.
The war in Europe could have ended even as much as a year earlier were it not for the British political leadership.
As George Marshall would state in 1957 to his official biographer Forrest Pogue: “Hopkins’s job with the president was to represent the Russian interests. My job was to represent the American interests.”
Was Hopkins representing Russian interests at a time of American need?
Who was Harry Hopkins?
“Churchill famously urged that the advance on Germany continue from already-won bases in Italy”
I wish people would publish quotes to back up such complete nonsense. But of course if there were any quotes to back this up, it wouldn’t be the complete nonsense that it is.
Churchill in fact advocated a ‘dilly dally’ strategy. As long as Germans and Russians were killing each other, he was perfectly happy to sit on the sidelines.
He figured we’d have to fight the Russians after the war anyway. The more that were dead, the better.
Churchill actually advocated a strong allied thrust through south central Europe. He actually ordered a British offensive that cost the lives of many brave soldiers. In his defense he was never fooled by Hitler and understood Stalin. The post war history of Eastern Europe would have been far different if a significant Anglo-American force had been present with the Russians. However those who pointed out that the logistics of fighting in South Central Europe would have been a nightmare and therefore causalities would have been similar to what the Russians suffered were probably correct. IMHO Churchill was always haunted by his role in the disaster at Gallipoli in 1915 and in an odd way was trying to vindicate his strategy that victory over Germany was achieved through the “soft underbelly of Europe”.
I always thought that the presence of the Alps led to this preference in strategy.
Marshall and Hopkins wanted to invade France in 1943 which would have been an absolute disaster. Only Churchill's insistence prevented this major error. The invasion of Normandy was planned by the British with oversight from Eisenhower. The invasion was the greatest amphibious success in the history of warfare. But soon after the invasion the allies were being defeated on the ground despite superior men and material and complete air superiority.
Pattton was finally returned to active command. He quickly outflanked and soundly defeated the Germans. The German Army was low on supplies and close to starvation in late 1944. Its ranks filled with boys and middle aged men. The Allies should have won the war in late 1944 but the Allies failed to secure the Port of Antwerp until December 1944. They wasted resources and time on the failed Operation Market Garden.
The Allies had an enormous advantage by 1944. The Germans were fighting on two fronts and their resources were being rapidly depleted. Allies had total air superiority by late 1944. German cities were being bombed day and night.
The invasion of France and the maintenence of the front in Italy helped to end the war. Leaving more troops in Italy would have made little difference.
Because that whole Dardanelles thing worked out so great in WWI???
Sometimes, just because someone we don’t like wants it ... doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do.
Of interest to our group.
And really West is backwards in calling D-Day the Stalin strategy. The strongest argument for the invasion of Sicly and Italy was the fact that at the time Stalin alone was facing German ground forces. The Allies had cleared North Africa and the invasion of France was, according to the plans at the time, a good 18 months away. Neither Churchill or Roosevelt felt that we could let Stalin shoulder the entire burden for that long. So it was Italy that was the sop to Stalin and not France.
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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.
This is ludicrous. Ms. West’s rewriting of events in World War Two wrecks her credibility on other issues.
The problem was that Northern Italy was more easily defensible by the Germans.
We would have needed to go over the Alps to reach Germany that way.
In contrast, invading from France was flat to the Rhine.