The 'Second D-Day' allied invasion of the south of France was proclaimed a success but [tr]

UK Daily Mail ^ | June 11, 2019 | James Gant

[Antoninus]

Operation Torch didn’t happen until November 1942, by which time we already knew the Nazi armed forces had been broken by the USSR on the Eastern front.

Huh? There was absolutely no sense that the Axis was broken in 1942. As in zero.

[dfwgator]

Look at the area of Russia the Nazis occupied compared to all of the other countries they occupied. Russia’s biggest asset was its’ sheer size.

[Antoninus]

Wars are not won by generals. They are won by logistics.

Bingo. As the old adage goes, "An army marches on its belly."

[schurmann]

“...PC was already in play in 1945. Patton wanted to take on the Russians.” [Terry Mross, post 30]

George S Patton Jr was a good field commander, but he was indifferent concerning the larger strategic picture.

The Western Allied leaders were aware of Soviet intentions and mischief; the general US public was not. There was a deal of concern over Soviet actions as the Red Army closed in on eastern Germany. Winston Churchill ordered the UK Imperial General Staff to prepare campaign plans with the major objective of pushing the Red Army out of Poland; he was told the requisite forces did not exist. On VE Day, the Red Army had 480 divisions afield; at their peak, the Western Allies could muster only 130 or so (my memory is less clear on the Allied figures; it’s in _Winston’s War_ by Max Hastings).

All this was quite apart from internal politics in USA, UK, France, and the smaller powers. By late 1944 war-weariness was mounting; there was significant doubt about governmental stability inside the United States as the Feds were running out of money. It was remedied in part by the iconic photo of the second flag-raising on Iwo Jima; survivors went on a bond tour which became the most successful of the war.

To sum up, the public in the West was losing its nerve, while the national governments had not generated the forces needed. Patton was overestimating Allied capabilities to deal with the Soviets.

[oldvirginian]

“The USSR did almost all the heavy lifting in the European theater.”

While that is true the Soviets were the only ones NOT fighting on multiple fronts. The Brits, and later the U.S., were fighting against Germany in North Africa in 1941 and the Japanese in Asia after the Dec, 1941 Japanese invasion of British Hong Kong.

The USSR signed the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact of 1941 prior to the start of Operation Barbarossa which allowed the USSR to move their troops from the Manchurian border to Eastern Europe in anticipation of the German offensive.

Stalin began promising a front against the Japanese as early as the Second Moscow Conference in August, 1941.
At the Tehran Conference in Nov/Dec, 1943 Stalin insisted that Germany be defeated before he would fight the Japanese.

After the German surrender Stalin drug his feet until August9, 1945. Ironically AFTER both atomic bombs had been dropped and the same day Hirohito convened the meeting that led to accepting the terms of surrender.
Soviet forces kept fighting the Japanese forces in Manchuria for three weeks. Two weeks after Japan had surrendered.

Screw the Russians.

[Mr Rogers]

According to Wiki, about 15 million Germans were lost (killed, captured or missing) on the eastern front versus 5 million or so on the western front. The difference is we captured people while the Russians killed them. For example, of the 90,000 German prisoners taken at Stalingrad, only 5,000 survived captivity.

Knowing something of that, Germans didn’t like surrendering to Soviets. Those that did....well, they died.

I don’t see how we would have won without the Russians. But I don’t see how they would have won without us. An army without vehicles to move food, for example, doesn’t travel very far. Nor does an army that cannot move its artillery. Or munitions.

And the German Air Force was kept pretty busy in the west.

[Oatka]

[Italian invasion] But tactically, it was a fortress, with lots of mountains and rivers well-suited to defense.

I could never figure out why, after taking Sicily, we didn't invade Sardinia or Corsica and do an Inchon cut-em-off-at-the neck invasion from there.

I understand air attacks from the mainland as well as those islands, but it is my understanding that they were lightly defended. Once we installed our own air bases there, the threat would have been much reduced.

Anzio was supposed to do that (or at least outflank the souther defenses), but our general dithered and didn't take the high ground soon enough. When we did, Clark turned north so he could claim the capture of Rome, instead of east and severing the peninsula. Many unwarranted deaths, and the Germans were still there when the war ended.