Let us arbitrarily assume that D-Day was a disaster, for whatever reason you might come up with - the beach defenses end up all being like Omaha’s, the Führer didn’t sleep so reserve tank divisions are committed to the defence, the paratroopers screw up catastrophically, whatever. The point is: D-Day has failed, and every soldier in a parachute or sent on those beaches ends up either dead or a wretched POW.
How does the war go from there ? Did the Allies have enough young men to give it another go ? Would the landings in Provence and Italy have been enough to topple the Western front ? Would Russia have crushed Germany on its own, and if so, how would the post-war map have looked ? Assuming there’s no Bastogne, would the German counter attack have been aimed at the Soviets, and crushed their advance ?
More or less. The western allies faced only a fraction of the Germans the Soviets were fighting. And the threat of Dragoon and/or a second Overlord keeps most of those units in the west anyway. The Germans save some ammo, fuel and some men. So they would be better equipped to fight the Soviets. Maybe it extends the war a few months. But it is hard to imagine that Berlin stands long enough to get nuked in August '45. I figure it falls by June '45 at the latest, and the Soviets are on the Rhine by September. If there is still real resistance, the Rhineland would likely be turned into a radioactive wasteland before December '45.
In any case the odds are pretty good that the western allies would be back in France by the end of summer '44. Dragoon was already scheduled, and aside from needing the navy for transport, it really wasn’t coordinated or dependent on Overlord. A second Overlord would be the next big priority, and if necessary the western allies would have stolen men and equipment from the Pacific. So ironically the biggest effect would probably be to delay the invasion of the Philippines.
I probably made this point in the other thread, but Overlord failing in the sense of actually being defeated by the Germans and the Allies being driven back into the sea was simply not a realistic possibility; it would require the intervention of alien space bats. The Allies were landing in far too much force on too many beaches and with such massive aerial and naval support as to make defeat an impossibility. A large part of the reason that Omaha was so brutal was that the Germans had managed to move the 352nd Infantry Division up to the beach area without being noticed by Allied intelligence. Notably the 352nd was a particularly strong division in that it was one of the few German infantry divisions that was still on a 9 battalion establishment; starting in 1943 the organization tables for infantry divisions was reduced to 6 battalions each, more as an organizational acknowledgement of the constant severe attrition on the Eastern front than any actual strength reduction per division. Expensive as it was, Omaha was a success. By the end of the day the Americans had broken out of the beach and through the German main defensive line overlooking the beach.
The paratroop landings did in fact screw up catastrophically, the landings were scattered all to hell. On average each ‘stick’ (planeload) missed its intended drop zone by several miles, some by as much as 25 miles. The drop patterns of the 101st and 82nd from the official US Army history shows just how badly fucked up it was.
An earlier release of the panzer divisions wouldn’t have defeated the Allies either; the 21st Panzer Division tried and failed to counterattack the British beaches on D-day. The 12th SS Hitlerjugend Panzer Division fared no better on D+1. The rest of the panzer divisions weren’t going to get to the beach area much faster than they did historically; Allied airpower caused them much more delay than Hitler not immediately releasing them did. This was one of the main reasons Overlord wasn’t going to fail: even though they had to cross the sea to arrive, the Allies were able to reinforce the beachhead much faster than the Germans were able to. The French rail network and bridges throughout Normandy had been heavily hit by Allied strategic bombing in the months preceding the landings and the overwhelming Allied air supremacy made any movement on the roads by day slow and costly.
Even if the Germans had more panzer divisions located closer to the beaches, the massive amount of naval gunfire support available to the Allies would make the chances of a counterattack succeeding unlikely in the extreme. A look at Salerno is illustrative of this. Salerno was at the absolute limit of Allied fighter cover range, they could spend very little time on station before having to return to refuel. As a result the Luftwaffe was able to make a rare appearance on the battlefield at this point in the war. The Allies landed right on top of the 16th Panzer Division which the Germans were able to rapidly reinforce with the Herman Goering Panzer and the 15th and 29th Panzergrenadier Divisions and elements of the 3rd Panzergrenedier. Though the fighting was desperate, the German counterattack on the beachhead failed, in no small part due to naval gunfire. They simply could not conduct offensive operations effectively while in range of effective naval gunfire. Even with the advantages of being able to reinforce at Salerno faster than the Allies and the use of the Luftwaffe on a limited scale they failed to drive the Allies back into the sea. They had neither of those advantages at Normandy, and the Allies had far more airpower and naval gunfire support in Normandy than they did at Salerno.
A more plausible failure for Overlord would be the Germans managing to contain the Allies to a fairly shallow beachhead and preventing them from breaking out of it in a situation similar to what happened at Anzio. It may seem counter-intuitive due to the difficulties they need to overcome, but amphibious invasions almost never failed in WW2. I can think of no major amphibious invasion that failed and only two minor ones, the Allies at Dieppe and the Japanese in the first landing on Wake Island.
Oddly enough, many of the forces used in the Ardennes offensive were actually used in the last German offensive of the war, the ill-fated Lake Balaton Offensive against the Soviets in March 1945. In any event, even if alien space bats intervened and Overlord was defeated on the beaches, Germany was going to be defeated by the USSR. By mid '44 even a stalemate on the Eastern Front just wasn’t in the cards for Germany even if the Western Allies inexplicably dropped out of the war.
Now this is what I never understood about Operation Dragoon. Apparently they didnt have any problems landing, but I cant understand
how such a big landing didnt need any of the ressources of Overlord
2)where did Operation Dragoon start from exactly. I mean Overlord started in Britain (I mean that’s where the invading force loaded on the boats) but where did Dragoon start.
P.S: so, does that mean that the US Army is not responsible for my lack of proficiency in German?
It depends on what you mean. The Germans lost the War at Stalingrad, not at D-Day, but without American and British support during WWII, the Soviets probably would have Bern beaten.
In fact, the Soviets were so desperate for allied supplies that they(with the British) toppled the government of Iran and installed Reza Shah.
I agree that was the turning point, but let’s not forget Germany retained enough strength to be very dangerous in 1943 at Kursk.
I assume that’s a typo for “have been beaten” and not a swipe at Soviet power relative to Switzerland. Western Allied material support was enormous, but also, it’s hard to quantify the psychological aspect of the outpouring of resources and intelligence from allies. In crudest terms, the war can be seen as an effort to persuade the Soviet masses and Stalin himself that resistance was hopeless. In that light, even though Stalin was suspicious of their motives (well, he was suspicious of everything, all the time, really) he cannot help but have found confidence in the alliance itself, as well as in all the goodies it brought. The idea that one is not alone is a very powerful idea indeed.
Did we have the capacity to produce enough uranium or plutonium to make more bombs than we did? I thought I’d read somewhere that Trinity, Fat Man, and Little Boy used up just about all we’d been able to produce up to that point.
Maybe we would have used what we had against Germany instead of Japan, but dropping any more than two atomic bombs would have had to wait a bit.
The Allied air forces put 12,000 aircraft in the air for the invasion – and some of them flew more than one sortie. The Germans had only 170 serviceable aircraft with which to respond, and as I recall, legend has it that only two German fighters reached the invasion site that day.
In terms of “sorties over the beaches,” that puts the ratio at 14,000 to 2, or 7,000:1 odds.
Its not that it didn’t need resources, its that it didn’t need anything additional. Most of the resources were inherited from Overlord. By the end of June they had all sorts of landing craft available, because those were no longer needed in Normandy. The remaining Mulberry harbor and the port of Cherbourg were handling the incoming men and equipment. No one was humping gear from landing craft over a beach any more. So here the allies had all this lovely beach assault equipment. And there were lovely beaches to assault. It just fit together so well. Most of the equipment ended up in the Pacific, but they gave it a good use in Dragoon before it was shipped over.
Baron Greenback already covered the basics. Most of the Dragoon Force staged in Italy and sailed from Naples and Taranto. The 1st Airborne Task Force, some special forces units and the French 9th Colonial division sailed from Corsica. And the French 1st Armor division sailed from Algeria. I think that covers the major units.
P.S. - Yep. I certainly don’t mean to denigrate the role the American soldiers played in Europe. But most of the heavy lifting was done by the Soviets. The western allies played a significant role. They saved lives and time. Every time they took on and defeated a Axis unit that was one less that the Soviets had to face. The Soviets lost in the neighborhood of 9-10 million soldiers. The US lost around 400 thousand.
The US was already assembling a third bomb with a planned delivery date of August 17th or 18th. They were producing enough material that war planners were expecting to receive three additional bombs in September and three in October. After that it was expected that production could increase by an additional two per month (5 in November, 7 in December, 9 in January, and so on). In the actual turn of events, the US did not expand production because the war ended. And there are good reasons to question the predictions. But the US had more at hand… and more coming online. 15-30 bombs would have been available before the end of the year.
This is often said and totally false. The effort in the West was quite considerable and it is not a coincidence that Operation Bagration was timed to occur AFTER Overlord, so that the Germans might draw forces from the East to deal with the problem in the West (which in fact they did.)
The Eastern front was certainly a much larger battle in scope, but it’s silly to say the Western front wasn’t significant, and it’s absurd to say the Soviet effort would have gone precisely as it did had the Allies failed in Normandy. A total failure in France would have freed up a huge number of Nazi troops - dozens of divisions. the fighting was still pretty ferocious in the East; another few hundred thousand men would have made a significant difference. I don’t doubt the USSR would have won, inasmuchg as Bagration was going to be an awful disaster for the Germans no matter what, but the end of the war might well have been delayed a long time.
Of course, if the Soviets are slowed down, what happens is pretty simple and has already been mentioned; in August 1945, Berlin gets nuked.
As a side note, why do people always bring up the fact the Soviets lost many more men as evidence of their greater contribution? You don’t win wars by having YOUR guys killed. You win wars by killing the other guys.
Pretty much agree with RickJay on this. I think the standard assumption in these threads is that history would have played out exactly the say if the US and Britain just stayed home and left things up to the Soviets. Had the invasion completely failed (i.e. had the Germans actually managed to throw them completely back into the sea), I am not seeing how the Soviets would have just continued on as before. The Germans were caught between two fires, having to divert significant forces and logistics between to very widely separated fronts. If they had secured the western front (which they would have done for at least another year or so, as it would have taken at least that long for the allies to mount another operation on that scale after having this one crushed) then they would have been able to divert huge numbers of forces to fighting on the eastern front and simplified their logistics issues.
In the end they most likely would still have lost, but it might have taken a extra year or even more, and the Soviet and German causalities would have been that much greater…and possibly the Germans could have stabilized a defense that would have broken the teeth of a Soviet advance. The rate at which the Soviets were losing mean and material, especially in their final push into Germany (and WITH the US and other allies putting significant pressure on them from the west and diluting their ability to defend and support), I don’t see how they could sustain such an effort indefinitely. If the Germans could have hurt them a lot more in '44, I think it’s possible that Germany hangs on into '46 or even '47, assuming the US doesn’t drop an atomic bomb on Berlin and ends it the same way we ended things against Japan.
Absolute rot, old boy. Look at how Germans were killed on the Eastern Front vs. the west. By 31/12/44 (and that’s after D-Day and before Berlin) casualties on the west were 12.39% of those on the east. The Soviets had stomped the Germans at Kursk, the largest armoured engagement in history, in 1943 while D-Day was a year away.
Ideologically the eastern front was the main point of the war in German eyes, the western allies were a bit of an inconvenient afterthought. While Britain suffered during the Battle of Atlantic and the Blitz, German barbarity in occupied eastern territory fuelled by racial ideology and the eastern slav untermensch was on another level. The Soviets for their part were utterly determined to take their revenge on Berlin and Germans in general no matter what the western allies cooked up, no matter how many casualties they took in the process.
You also ignore the implications of transferring divisions in the west to the east. They were still needed there, as the western allies were still a threat. Maybe towards the end Hitler would have a few more to try and throw at the Soviets, if they hadn’t surrendered to the western allies (who still have Operation Dragoon coming up from southern France, their forces in Italy, and would likely have tried D-Day again later - only alien space bats would totally wipe out the men and materiel stationed in Britain) rather than face certain death at the hands of the Soviets, if they were lucky.
Western effort wasn’t totally insubstantial, particularly lend-lease, but compared to the gargantuan Soviet meatgrinder it begins to fade in significance. The only question was how much of Germany and western Europe the Soviets would devour without a stronger western presence. Berlin fell at the beginning of May. You really think the Germans would have held off the Soviets for a further four months in we’d have cocked-up D-Day?
That’s actually one of the angles I was shooting for - I was wondering if the slow, gruelling push through Italy and Dragoon alone would have been enough to still be able to race the Soviets to Berlin, and if those forces would have been able to cross the Rhine by themselves.
And then, assuming the answer to that is “meh, not likely”, then I get to wonder whether Stalin would have stopped at the Rheinland… or figured that since he was halfway there, he might as well shoot for Amsterdam too, maybe a slice of Alsace, perhaps even Brest while he was at it (though I daresay the re-conquest of France was pretty much in the bag by the end of '44 no matter what - sandwiched between the RAF bombers and the armies coming from Provence, and with maquisard/FFI activities bolstered by the Allied invasion to boot I don’t really see Hitler’s French contingent resisting overly much).
Western Allied material support was enormous, but also, it’s hard to quantify the psychological aspect of the outpouring of resources and intelligence from allies. In crudest terms, the war can be seen as an effort to persuade the Soviet masses and Stalin himself that resistance was hopeless. In that light, even though Stalin was suspicious of their motives (well, he was suspicious of everything, all the time, really) he cannot help but have found confidence in the alliance itself, as well as in all the goodies it brought. The idea that one is not alone is a very powerful idea indeed.