Posted on 06/11/2019 6:48:02 AM PDT by C19fan
It is the lesser known allied invasion of southern France - dubbed the 'second D-Day' - that saw 580,000 troops pour on to beaches and swiftly beat back the Nazi forces.
The attack, just five weeks after the hard-fought invasion of Normandy in Operation Overlord, was quickly hailed a success with most of southern France liberated in just a month.
However, military historian Anthony Tucker-Jones has now claimed Operation Dragoon was a futile exercise that later allowed Stalin to take over Eastern Europe.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
We needed Marseilles as a port, especially since we were very late in capturing Antwerp.
So southern France proved vital to continuing operations in the West.
The rest is history. Imagine if the allies did not kiss Stalin's butt and give half of Germany and Eastern Europe to the maniac? Stalin and the Soviets murdered more people than Hitler and the Nazis. Communism should have been destroyed just as Nazism was. It is hard to comprehend that one reason that we invaded France was for the benefit of Stalin opening another front.
Correct.
And we could defeat Germany fast, or we could occupy parts of southern Europe, but we couldn’t do both.
It would have just expedited the Mohammedan takeover of Europe.
We didn’t exactly “give” those places to the USSR.
The USSR did almost all the heavy lifting in the European theater. We get such crappy history education in this country that most people here don’t seem to understand that the USSR is overwhelmingly responsible for the defeat of Nazi Germany. The scale of the war on the “eastern front” is unparalleled in history and is very unlikely to ever be repeated again.
The end of the Nazi regime was determined at Stalingrad and Leningrad (St. Petersburg), not on the beaches of France.
In 1944 1/3 of supplies to the front were processed through southern France. It was a vital operation obtained at a low cost.
>>Churchill saw it as a waste of resources. The cigar-smoking statesman favoured renewing the offensive in Italy or landing in the Balkans.
Churchill called Italy the soft underbelly of the axis, and I suppose it looked like that on a strategic map. But tactically, it was a fortress, with lots of mountains and rivers well-suited to defense. The Balkans had similar rough terrain. And how an attack either place was to slow the Soviets makes no sense.
Dragoon may not have been as successful as just reinforcing Overlord and, especially, the 3rd Army. But the logistics probably werent there for that, and Im sure Eisenhower wanted the ports of the Riviera as a hedge vs. the limited logistics at the channel ports. Remember that the temporary invasion beach harbors with their Mulberries were used for 10 months because the German destruction and mining of ports like Cherbourg and Antwerp was so effective.
The Allies could never absorb the causalities the Germans inflicted upon the Soviets.
Tell it to Audie Murphy. He invaded France from the south. Some say he was involved in some fighting.
Jackass.
“The end of the Nazi regime was determined at Stalingrad and Leningrad (St. Petersburg), not on the beaches of France.”
Lots of people died on the eastern front. But Russia would not have won on its own, any more than we would have won alone.
Seems Yalta 1945 was more of a catastrophe for the allies vs Russia..
Lend lease mechanized Soviet infantry. Without it they wouldn’t have been able to hold out and then effectively launch counter attacks in depth, let alone feed their armies
No. The Dragoon invasion force was four divisions and a bit. There may have been 580,000 troops that landed in southern France and then went to the fighting in the north during the entire war, but the article makes it seem like they landed all at once. Bad writing.
> But Russia would not have won on its own
It was the USSR then, and it came damned close to it.
The Battle of Stalingrad went from August 1942 through February 1943.
First Western landing in Europe was in September 1943.
I strongly encourage a month-by-month review of the progress of WW2 to dispel myths about how things really went down.
It is hard to comprehend that one reason that we invaded France was for the benefit of Stalin opening another front. .............................. You can thank FDR and his advisors (cabinet) for allowing Stalin the benefit. Stalin wasn’t liberating anyone, he was conquering.
The Red Army was supplied via trucks made in Detroit and pork raised in Iowa. The logistics support we gave the Russians was simply incredible.
Lend Lease to Russia
From Major Jordan’ Diaries
http://www.jrbooksonline.com/fdr-scandal-page/lend.html
One could argue that without the material support of the United States Russia would have fallen.
Yes, giving war materiel to the USSR was our primary contribution to the defeat of the Nazis.
The US in WW2 mostly fought in the Pacific against Japan. By the time we landed in Europe it was a mop-up operation; the Soviets had already cleaned the Germans out of almost all of Eastern Europe and had even crossed the border of Germany proper, before a single Western soldier landed on the continent.
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