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.
Had an invasion of Europe been launched before the American forces learned modern warfare, we would have been slaughtered.
Yeah that and also some info has recently come out that the Germans wanted nothing more then to bleed us white in the mountains of Italy.
However I do agree that Stalin was a big advocate for the Normandy invasion. And FDR loved Uncle Joe. Doesn’t necessarily make it wrong military strategy however.
Then there was the British/Churchillian idea of a Balkan invasion (separate from operations in Italy) that never really got off the ground.
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=83714
Speculative history is a rathole - I think all we can say for sure is that Stalin did want a European front (and he wanted it sooner than it eventually occurred) and in the end, Overlord did what it was hoped for it, albeit at quite substantial cost and implications for post WWII Europe.
Terrain-wise, Italy was very easy to defend. It is narrow and mountainous. Even more so as you go North—when you come to the Alps. Many people don’t realize, but we also invaded France from the South later in the summer of ‘44. That was a much easier slog.
In retrospect, if there had been no D-Day, Stalin may have shot himself in the foot. Without D-Day, he might have conquered all of Germany.
Yep. The mountains of Italy lent themselves far better to defense than the plains of Western Europe. Ask Patton about that one.
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.
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.
FDR was our first communist president.
>>>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.<<<
Bingo. That trend continued after the War as well until 1960s when communists hijacked British strategy in the Middle East (Arab terrorism against Israel was originally a way for the British to wage a proxy war for influence against US).