Stalin believed the invasion of France was delayed so that Soviet losses against the Germans would be increased. Is there any truth to that?
No. Churchill might have privately thought it, but FDR was convinced he could “handle” Uncle Joe. The invasion took place as soon as we had adequate supplies, men and equipment in place and enough amphibious capability to deliver them to France. If anything, they would have been concerned about German losses, not Soviet ones.
It was a massive invasion going across water, and to have the best chance of success they needed clear weather, a full moon, and high tides. Bad weather could swamp the landing craft, and the full moon and high tides would help them to avoid obstacles on the beach. This only gave them a few narrow windows of opportunity, and if they missed one window, they would have to wait weeks for another.
You also have to remember that a big part of the invasion was deception. They were doing their best to make the Germans think that the attack was coming at Calais. The whole thing had to be very carefully planned out, not only to make sure the weather conditions were right, but also to get it done as quickly as possible so that the real point of invasion wouldn’t be discovered. Any delays could have allowed the Germans more time to figure out what they were up to, and could have jeopardized the entire operation.
This was the first time the Channel had been forced since 1066. Churchill called it “the largest operation ever attempted.”
Failure, with a second attempt then required, would have been … very inconvenient.
It’s nonsense. It’s true that Churchill was very wary of a cross-channel invasion (he was acutely concerned about the possibility of a First World War stalemate in France, particularly given British shortages of man-power) but had had to agree to it at the Quebec conference in August 1943. By this time the every increasing American strength meant that Roosevelt and Marshall could call the shots. Stalin was given a date of May 1944 at the Tehran conference in November/December '43 and the subsequent delay to early June was driven entirely by military (actually naval) considerations. The critical factor was the availability of the specialist landing ships.
Stalin had absolutely no idea of the difficulties of conducting a major amphibious operation against a defended coastline, particularly as he did not appreciate the Anglo-American need to minimise casualties - both from practical reasons, the Brits were running out of men, and political reasons, FWW style casualty rates were not politically acceptable on either side of the Atlantic. He was also completely paranoid about the western Allies motivations all through the war, seeing malicious intent however much they tried to aid him.Basically ascribing the sort of ruthless self interested reasoning he used to Churchill and Roosevelt.
It is possible. Might have been one consideration, although there were a LOT of decisions to be made at that time.
I did read that the U.S. and British DID NOT want to assassinate Hitler as they feared that Communism would then become an even greater threat to world peace. So they were thinking about keeping Russia in check. My source for this information is books on Joe Kennedy (Ambassador to Great Britain)…
-The Dark Side of Camelot: Seymour M. Hersh
-The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty he Founded - by Ronald Kessler
And unfortunately they didn’t have clear weather. The invasion was originally scheduled for June 5 but weather was terrible so they delayed it one day. Even on June 6, the weather was bad, and many landing craft did get swamped before reaching the beach, most of them didn’t land where they planned, and many men drowned trying to get from the boats to the beach. Actually very little went as planned in the first couple of days; it’s almost miraculous that they were able to succeed anyway.
–Mark
Stalin began pushing for invasion in 1942.
Of course he did. In large part due to his own mistakes the Soviet Union had suffered tremendous losses in 1941 and was under more pressure and suffering yet more losses in 1942. That does not mean that a cross channel invasion in 1942, or even 1943, was a remotely sensible operation.
The Western Allies did not have the troops, the equipment, or the doctrine to conduct a successful invasion much earlier than it did. Lots of things needed to happen before the invasion became more than a futile gesture and, in one sense Stalin was right, a pre-requirement of a successful invasion was for the German army to be worn down on the Eastern Front. The problem with any amphibious operation is building up your forces across the sea faster than the enemy can gather theirs on land and prior to 1944 the western allies just could not do this. With interior lines, reasonably intact railways, an undefeated Luftwaffe, and the army not yet shredded on the Eastern front an invasion would most likely result in an Anglo-American army bottled up in a small beachhead on the French coast.
Indeed, troop convoys under constant air attack would not have made for a good invasion.
This is the real answer. One thing to keep in mind is that the US wasn’t even in the war until 1942 (technically Dec 1941), and had ZERO combat experience. Meanwhile, the British were fighting in N. Africa. So we went and helped out.
Once that was done, Sicily was invaded in July 1943 and Italy proper in September.
This DID have the effect of pulling Hitler’s attention away from the Battle of Kursk and on his orders, drawing reserves away that might have been used to exploit a breakthrough in the south near Prokhorovka.
However, the Italian campaign was roughly 23 divisions in total, while the first day at Normandy was 12, and with a further 25 or so coming in by August.
Plus, in 1943, the Luftwaffe was still a force to be reckoned with, as evidenced by the horrific bomber losses. But… in January 1944, the P-51 and drop tanks came into service, and the USAAF, and to a lesser degree, the RAF engaged on a campaign of mounting increasingly huge bomber raids on Germay with the intent of drawing out the Luftwaffe to defend against them, and then destroying them. This worked spectacularly; the Allies could easily afford to replace their losses by that point, while the Germans could not; especially pilot losses.
So had we tried invading France in 1943, we’d have faced a potent Luftwaffe, as well as a German army not yet on the permanent defensive against the Soviets. And all this with a MUCH smaller and inexperienced force relative to what we had in June 1944.
Case in point- once the US troops broke out at Arromanches, they quickly surrounded the defending Germans and slaughtered them in the Falaise pocket. From there, they advanced really quickly across France, and essentially outran their supply lines and were forced to stop. Had we not massed such forces in Normandy, this wouldn’t have happened, and we’d have been much more vulnerable to counterattacks. Imagine a Battle of the Bulge-style counterattack in say… July 1944, with effective Luftwaffe support. It might have driven the Allies out of France.
The Americans felt – or claimed to feel – they were ready to go as soon as possible, perhaps in 1942, certainly in 1943. This was perhaps wishful thinking. The British, particularly Churchill, sought to delay the invasion, feeling that the allies were not logistically ready to support the gigantic effort that would be necessary for success, that the Germans were too strong (particularly the Luftwaffe as described in posts above), and that the US Troops didn’t fully understand what they would be facing when it came to German combat power.
He was right on all counts – the initial invasion plans had to be dramatically increased in scope (requiring many more landing craft and more air, naval, and logistical support); the Luftwaffe had to be beaten down, and the American Army proved woefully ill-prepared in its first encounters with the Germans (see Kasserine Pass).
By 1944 all these things had been fixed.
ital added.
I’m not being snarky here: what do you mean by “doctrine” in this case?
Partial answer from Wikipedia article on the Battle of Kasserine Pass:
Edit: Basically, we didn’t know what we were doing. A lot of fantasy about how the Germans would conduct battle needed to be replaced by actual hard-won lessons (AND those had to be taken seriously by senior command).
No, you have to remember that Stalin was both paranoid and hypocritical, and that this accusation is actually projection based on what Stalin did. Prior to Barbarossa, Stalin was supplying the Nazis with war material during the battles of France and Britain, he not only sat back to allow the Western Allies and Axis to drain each other, but actively supported Hitler’s operations, and kept doing so right up until the Wermacht crossed the border. So his ‘accusations’ really amount to ‘I think you are doing a lesser version of what I did’.
The US invaded Africa in 1942 and Europe in 1943, just over two years after the last oil shipment from the USSR to Germany, which is not a slow turn around time. Americans were initially in favor of a 1943 invasion of France instead of Italy, but the decision to invade Italy was based on real military factors and the political chance to knock Italy (who did contribute an army of a quarter million troops to the fighting in Russia) out of the war. I (and some historians) think a 1943 invasion of France might have been a better course of action overall, but that has the benefit of hindsight, especially of knowing that the Italians would be woefully incompetent in switching sides.
Keep in mind that during WWI Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, was the guy who proposed the Gallipoli landings. Which did not go … well. So he wasn’t the most gung-ho guy among the Allies in terms of rushing the landings.
I was using the term a bit loosely here. Strictly, in military terms, doctrine is the principles that guide military operations but I was meaning the military and naval knowledge to land a large modern army on an enemy shore and then fight a successful battle when you are there. Hard lessons had to be learned on conducting amphibious operations, lessons learned during Operations Jubilee (Dieppe), Torch (N Africa), Husky (Sicily), Avalanche (Salerno) and Shingle (Anzio), without which Overlord just couldn’t have happened. The scale of the landing operations was phenomenal and it needed practical experience on smaller invasions for the planners and the commanders to get it right. To be successful once ashore the Americans in particular needed the sort of practical lesson in fighting the Germans **Sailboat **has pointed out. The Allies also need how to learn how to successfully integrate air power into the mix - army cooperation and support had never been a strong point of either the RAF or the USAAF - and it was in North Africa that the British Army and the RAF learned how.
There are probably lots of other areas where the experience gained in the years before was essential to pulling off the Normandy invasion but you get the idea.
Well, no. Churchill’s thinking in WW2 was very much in the same mould as his 1915 thinking that led to the Dardanelles. Use sea power to make landings away from the main body of the main enemy, in WW1 “knocking away the props”, in WW2 “attacking the soft under-belly of the Axis”. Churchill was very happy to see landings in Italy or the Balkans. The lesson he drew from Gallipoli was that the operation was not properly resourced or conducted, not that it was wrong in principle. What he did not want, and he feared would be the result of an invasion of northern France, was a repeat of the Somme or Passchendaele with the British army in trenches slugging it out with the Germans in WW1 style.
I’m not totally sure about the above statements. Yes, we were not as ready in 1943 but the Germans Atlantic Wall was also not fully built yet either. US Marines were storming beaches in the Pacific by this time so I think an invasion as early as 1943 could have been possible. Our air power in europe was good enough in 1943 to support the troops.
Thats another thing. The US used army troops for the dday amphibious landings and not more experienced marines. The interservice rivalry was way out of control.
Not only Stalin, but many of those who sympathised with a socialist cause, demanded “Second Front, Now!”, shortly after the US entered the war FDR rather rashly promised to open a second front by the end of 1942 - Operation Sledgehammer. After the disaster at Dieppe it was wisely shelved, in favour of Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa.
When Churchill met Stalin in Moscow in 1942 he tried to sell the landings in Africa as a ‘Second Front’, drawing a picture of a crocodile and that they were trying to get at its belly, as well as the efforts of the strategic bombing campaign against Germany. Stalin remained unconvinced.
Not helping matters was the calamitous decision which led to the loss of PQ17, an Arctic convoy running guns to Archangel, meant more broken promises when the Allies halted their aid convoys and questions asked about the convoy itself and seriously soured relations between the western Allies and Soviets.
In one of Churchill’s volumes about the war he writes that Stalin at one point asked him to transfer British units to the frontlines in Russia and place them under Soviet command, like the French and British had done in World War I. Stalin also suggested that if the British were too afraid to invade France he would send ‘three or four Russian Army Corps to do the job’. Churchill dismissed both out of hand as wildly impractical.
Details on the exact Russian feeling on the broken promises of Sledgehammer, as well as the Arctic convoys, can be found in Churchill and Roosevelt, The Complete Correspondence: Volume 1, Alliance Emerging October 1933-November 1942.;
Stalin also made comments to Churchill that “A man who was not prepared to take risks could not win a war. Why were we so afraid of the Germans? His experience showed that troops must be blooded in battle. If you did not blood your troops you had no idea what their value was.”
Comments made later by Soviet foreign minister Molotov make it pretty clear that Stalin was, shall we say, milking it a bit in order to extract any other forms of support, knowing that a 1942 invasion was “…impossible. But he needed that paper agreement. It was of great importance for the people, for politics, and for future pressure on the Allies…We didn’t believe in a second front, of course, but we had to try for it. We took them in: You can’t? But you promised…That was the way.”