First, the Luftwaffe wasn’t significantly bloodied in 1943, so even if we did have air cover for a proposed landing, it would have been a terrific aerial fight that we weren’t sure to win.
Second, your understanding of the war’s timeline is way off if you think the USMC was particularly “more experienced” by June 1944. They’d performed amphibious landings at Tarawa, the Gilberts and the Marshall islands by that point, while the US Army had done landings in N. Africa, Sicily and Italy by that point, so the experience was roughly equal. At any rate, it’s not like D-Day was the Army’s first amphibious landing of the war. And it wasn’t the unmitigated disaster movies and TV make it out to be. Omaha Beach was pretty much a disaster, but Utah was probably the easiest landing beach of all, British and Canadian included.
Beyond that, the bigger issue was one of training; the US Army had a lot of activated divisions, but very few were actually ready for combat in 1943. We probably had enough divisions ready to force a landing, but were woefully short if by some chance, we’d achieved a breakthrough and started pushing the Germans back.
US Marines were storming beaches in the Pacific but not on anything like the scale needed for a successful invasion of France. Landing a Marine division on an island to fight a badly supplied and almost cut off Japanese force numbering in the thousands is not the same as landing in France to fight a German army which, although mauled at Stalingrad, still deployed hundreds of divisions and thousands of tanks. They still had the ability to build up a strategic reserve to fight a Kursk in July, a force that if required could have been moved west while they went on the defensive in the east.
I am not knocking the skill and bravery of the Marines, the Japanese were always a fearsome enemy who died hard, but it just a different operation of war. Conquering an island is not the same as invading the Continent and fighting your way to Berlin. Apart from anything else the vast bulk of the soldiers needed to form 30-40 divisions needed were still being trained and the thousands of tanks still being built.
Equally, Allied air power in early 1943 was not on the same scale as in 1944. This is well before the full strength of the USAAF became effective and before the P51 had done irreparable damage to the Luftwaffe. In early 1943 achieving air superiority over the landing beaches would have been a very difficult proposition.
Yes, it might have been possible to land a force in northern France in 1943 but the chances of it doing anything useful when it got there would have been almost nil.
It had nothing to do with interservice rivalry. The marines and Army were equally experienced at this point (The army had also done a number of amphibious landings), but the marines were equipped and trained as a light infantry force. This was great for fighting in jungles in the pacific against the Japanese who had practically no armor, but was not great for fighting in France against the Germans who were well known for their armor. Also, there were only a total of six marine divisions total during WW2, mostly engaged in the pacific, while the Normandy landings alone used seven divisions. Expanding the marine corps to a large enough size for a major European landing and equipping them like army divisions doesn’t make any sense when you have the army available to do that.
Which is why he wasn’t against rushing the landings, as I said. He definitely was for them, just being quite cautious.
As to other landings: he was against Operation Dragoon, the S. France landing. IMHO, this was a good tactic, would have been better if they provided more fuel for the mobile units and directly lead to Marseilles being a major supply port for the remainder of the war.
(On June 5, 1944 all of France was in Axis hands. On Sep. 11, you could drive from Cherbourg to Marseilles thru Allied controlled territory. An amazing display of Allied landing capabilities.)
Did Churchill ever say ‘soft’ underbelly? I don’t think the original quotes about attacking the underbelly of Europe included the word soft–at least I could never find them–but I’ll defer to anyone with better cites. That seemed to be added after the fact, along with the connotation that the underbelly was weak.
Based on the quotation, Churchill just seems to be saying “We’re also going to attach them from the South.” Is there any indication that he thought attacking from the South was going to be easier?
Plus, in June 1944, there were only four Marine Divisions.
Another thing to remember is that few of the Pacific battles of any size were wholly USMC affairs. For example, on Kwajalein, it was the 4th Mar Div AND the 7th ID, on Guam, it was the 77th ID AND the 3rd Mar Div, and so on. In fact, there were MORE US Army divisions on Okinawa than Marine divisions, USMC propaganda notwithstanding. I don’t doubt that there was probably some knowledge transfer between units within the Army and Navy- either formally, or informally as officers were promoted/transferred around.
Beyond all that, I’m not sure what a USMC division would have accomplished in Normandy that the Army divisions didn’t. USMC divisions weren’t exactly known for their low casualty counts- I suspect they’d have done the exact same thing that the Army divisions did- perhaps a bit faster, but likely with higher casualties due to their more shock troop-style doctrine.
Note: Probably the thing that the USMC does best isn’t necessarily fighting, but propagandizing about their own accomplishments. To hear them tell it, you’d think they won the Pacific war singlehandedly and suffered more casualties than anyone else. In fact, like I pointed out above, there was almost always a large Army component to most Pacific battles. And in terms of casualties, the USAAF 8th Air Force in England suffered more killed in action over the course of the war than the USMC and US Navy COMBINED. Now I’m not disparaging the heroism or valor of the Marines, but rather pointing out that their post-war narrative and propaganda gives a somewhat distorted view of their relative importance in things.
“The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, in particular wanted to invade Italy, which in November 1942 he called “the soft underbelly of the axis” (and General Mark Clark, in contrast, later called “one tough gut”).”
From Churchill’s The Second World War; “I then described the military advantages of freeing the Mediterranean, whence still another front could be opened…To illustrate my point I had meanwhile drawn a picture of a crocodile, and explained to Stalin with the help of this picture how it was our intention to attack the soft belly of the crocodile as we attacked his hard snout. And Stalin, whose interest was now at a high pitch, said, “May God prosper this undertaking.””
Eisenhower in “Crusade in Europe” wrote that after the war ended, he got to meet all the top Russian generals. They were all very interested in learning about the D Day landings and after Eisenhower explained it, they all expressed admiration for the way it was handled.
One problem with the Italian campaign was intelligence before the invasion indicated that Hitler would not defend it. Guess what...he changed his mind and owing to the topography, good German generalship (Kesselring), not so good Allied generalship (Clark), it was a tough, slow moving front. Plus the Allies may have over estimated what strategic bombing of Germany could do and mis allocated resources to the aerial campaign, slowing the invasion timetable.
The western Allies could have taken a lot more risk and delayed the Pacific War further (even than the ‘Europe first’ strategy they followed) and invaded France in 1943, not Sicily and then mainland Italy. From a western POV it was completely sensible to avoid such a risk. And even from a Soviet POV there was risk that a failed invasion of France could hurt them, and it would been have much more likely.
AFAIK it’s standard Soviet history, and thus making a come back in Putinist Russia like other Soviet takes on history, that the Anglo-Americans were playing a double game in WWII to beat Germany but while also trying to weaken Russia. But I think it’s a combination of a) Soviet need to present the West to its people as a threat, and which Putin now also sees as in his interests, b) unrealistic consideration of what risks a country or set of countries would ever take trying to reduce casualties of other countries and c) simple lack of understanding of the air/sea/land campaign the Anglo-Americans had to conduct, including line of supply running back across the Atlantic, compared to the land-only (with even air a more minor adjunct) the Soviets had to conduct.
I always understood that the main critique of Clark was that ignored the orders of his superior in one essential operation - choosing to take the city of Rome rather than to surround and destroy the German 10th Army.
I don’t know if I’d say mis-allocated, but rather they sort of shifted gears at some point in late 1943/early 1944.
Early on, they were trying to bomb specific targets, and working under a bunch of mistaken pre-war assumptions about the ability of bombers to defend themselves, etc… So losses were consequently high and the missions were not too successful. As time went on, they adjusted and started doing more damage, but the biggest thing they accomplished until about mid-1944 was a strategy of attrition against the Luftwaffe. Essentially once they got P-51 Mustangs and drop tanks, the 8th Air Force would mount huge raids into Germany with the intent being as much to bomb a target on the ground, as to draw the Luftwaffe fighters up to be shot down by American fighter escorts. This worked spectacularly; by D-Day, the Luftwaffe had been crippled by this approach, and the 8th AF started a different tactic, and went after oil production and/or transportation infrastructure, both of which had dire effects on the German wartime economy. The oil campaign was directly effective, while the transportation attacks actually didn’t affect troop movements, etc… too badly, but they DID wreck the distribution of coal around the country, and for all intents and purposes, the German economy ran on coal. That’s why starting in about mid-late 1944, German production started to decline drastically- it wasn’t the bombing of the factories that did it- it was removing the coal that they needed to keep the lights on and the buildings warm.
I’m not at all convinced that reallocating resources away from strategic bombing in favor of an earlier invasion would have done much other than move the big fight with the Luftwaffe to right over the heads of Allied front-line troops, rather than having it done over Germany before the invasion began.
Don’t forget that the USSR WAS actually playing such a a double game early in WWII, that they invaded Poland alongside Germany and sent Germany valuable military supplies throughout the battles of France and Britain, and continued sending supplies until shortly after the invasion had started. The USSRs pre-Barbarossa actions tend to get glossed over in Russian-centric accounts of the war.
In other words, projection: Stalin was doing it to the Germans, and he assumed someone was doing it to him too. Paranoid as he was, he probably would buy into that way of thinking.
*Really *bad decision. The Brit were scared shitless of the Tirpitz, but honestly the two battleships and one Aircraft Carrier could have handled the Tirpitz, especially the American battleship USS Washington, with 9 16" guns.
The precise phrase “soft underbelly” does not turn up in Churchill’s writings or public speeches, but he apparently did use the phrase in private conversations. Full analysis from the Churchill Project.
