Not necessarily a slight to call Napoleon by his corporal rank. He is still refered (affectuously) in France as “Le petit caporal” (the little corporal, though by all historical accounts, Napoleon wasnt particularily small). And he was Corsican. Though, apparently, for many people in the US (or for many people posting from the US), that means he wasnt French.
In my opinion, the Italian campaign was the worst strategic error the Americans made in the war. A huge commitment of resources that wasn’t worth the gains - even the theoretical gains. Strategically, Italy was a front that went nowhere. If the allies had fought their way the entire length of Italy, they would have just come up against the alps. And as it actually turned out, they never made it that far. The allies landed on Sicily in July 1943 and on the Italian mainland in September 1943. The Italians had already surrendered so there was no political goal involved. And the Italian campaign moved so slowly that when allied troops finally crossed the Italian border, it was forces that had landed in France in 1944 who were crossing into Italy from the north.
I’ve never understood that. Didn’t any of the European Generals think about the island-hopping strategy used in the Pacific? They just went around the most heavily defended islands, leaving them to wither as their supplies dried up.
So why didn’t they just go around Caen, and keep going?
This is harder on land than with islands, because these enemy strongpoints in your rear can break out and come after you. But then they’ve lost the advantage of defensive fortifications, and are being forced to respond to your movements. It would have been tough, but still, would it have been worse than spending 2 months to take a little town?
We really needed the port. Unloading all the supplies an army on the move needs over the beach is a bitch and a half. We couldn’t have staged the break-out without a major port in Allied hands. As it was, we very nearly outran our supply lines.
North Africa was doable, particularly since the war there had been see-sawing back and forth since 1940 (something Americans seem to forget) and ought to be finished off, and with the Allies masters of the North African shore it opened the prospect of another bombing front. There was considerable pressure from the Soviets for a landing in Western Europe in 1942. Not that they really cared if it succeeded or not, but they wanted something (a bloody sacrifice if necessary, and they were throwing away thousands of lives at the same time) to take the pressure off the East. Plans for a last-ditch invasion in 1942 to keep the Soviets in the war were formulated. ROUNDUP was a plan to put 30 US and 16 British division ashores between Dieppe and Calais. SLEDGEHAMMER was a plan to put 8-10 divisions ashore on the Cherbourg peninsula. The British had no great enthusiasm for either, particularly SLEDGEHAMMER.
Some of the comments seem to overlook the difficulty of invading a fortified continent from overseas. Since the excursions of Henry’s IV and V don’t count, wasn’t the Invasion of Normandy the first successful “forcing” of the Channel since 1066?
Churchill called it “the largest operation ever attempted.” (One wonders what adjective he omitted: amphibious? military? Surely the building of the Great Pyramid was a “larger” operation? :smack: )
I don’t think so.
Based on the remains of living quarters found near the Pyramid, there were far fewer people involved than the soldiers in the D-Day invasion force. And then there were the sailors on ships that brought them over, and on ships providing artillery fire, and the airmen flying overhead, plus all the mechanics and maintenance people back in England, etc. To say nothing of the factory workers all over the world building equipment for D-Day, and the transportation workers moving it to southern England.
And remember that D-Day happened on one day; building that Pyramid was spread out over years (decades?).
I think D-Day was way bigger than the Great Pyramid.
Regarding the large numbers of German divisions. Am I right in thinking that many of these were in fact under their nominal strength (sometimes significantly so)? If so, is this something that Allied intelligence knew about? (In other words, did they overestimate the size of the potential opposition in Western Europe?)
To answer the first part of your question - Yes, to a degree. In 1944 only a very low part of the total of 300 divisions were available in France, (Vast majority were deployed on the eastern front, many in Italy and about 400k men were uselessly left guarding Norway and Denmark) and of those in France, a large amount of them were reserve divisions or divisions recuperating from battles in the East. Many of the Infantry divisions on the coast were made up of Osttruppen, that is more or less volunteer units with people from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine and so on. Often led by German officers, but the men themselves, understandably, were not very well trained and morale was not high.
Of the four German divisions directly in the area of the Normandy landings, two were so-called static divisions, compromising foreigners, people deemed unfit for regular duty, released prisoners and so on. This pattern repeated itself up the coast. One “good” unit and one “bad”.
The Germans were basically forced into making a screen of low quality, understrength formations, and hoped that their high quality units, mainly various panzer and SS Divisions, could assume a manouver role and land decisive blows at the invader, while he was busy overcoming the weaker holding forces.
How much the allies knew of the realities in this, I don’t know. However, even when one consider the low quality of many German divisions, and the low number of total divisions, D-Day was a very hard fight for the Allies - so I doubt the quality, or lack thereof, of the German fighting forces would have made much difference to earlier landing attempts. The Channel itself was the main obstacle.
You’re thinking of Cherbourg (which was another allied objective that the Germans held much longer than the allies expected). Caen was the nexus of several roads which were needed for transportation of supplies from the beach into the country.
Napoleon was never a corporal.
For that matter, a book I read recently about Hitler’s WWI experiences says that Hitler never was a corporal, either; he was promoted to some kind of intermediate rank between private and corporal, but Anglo historians have interpreted it as “corporal”.
About as near as we’re going to get since Gefreiter doesn’t really have an Anglo equivalent.
That’s the central tenet of blitzkrieg. Flow around the hard parts, surround them and hold them in place until you’ve won the bigger objective and finish them off later.
BUT
The allies couldn’t bypass Caen. It was the local road nexus and all travel in the area had to go through it. So although a tank can go cross-country, the endless caravan of supplies cannot. Plus, the Germans were aware of this and had the frontline well fortified to make any side-stepping attempts not worth the trouble.
They tried. They tried going west of the town with Operation Epsom, and then east of the town with Operation Goodwood. Both operations came close to success, but not quite.
Really, it wasn’t due to the town of Caen itself, but the forces the Germans sent to its defence. At the time of Goodwood, the bulk of the German armour - six out of eight panzer divisions in Normandy (sent, by the way, by the Germans to kick the allies back into the sea) - faced the British 2nd Army. They couldn’t just tiptoe past them, you know.
Island-hopping works in an island situation, it doesn’t work when you’re faced by a 100-mile front line manned from one end to the other by heavily-armed Germans.
If you want to learn more about the deception operations, you might find Operation Fortitude and the Double Cross system interesting. (Though I’ve never been clear whether the phrase “double-cross” - as in “betray” - came from this system, or whether this system was given a clever name with double meaning. Anyone know?)
In case it’s not obvious, the determining factor in whether you can bypass a strongpoint is its ability to reach out and harm your rear areas and your supply lines.
Islands weren’t “hopped” over while they had strong airpower resources that could attack ships at sea or bomb island bases within range; they were neutralized first (usually by air attack). Once the island no longer supported air forces, it could safely be bypassed unless it was needed as a base of some sort. For example, one of the main Japanese strongpoints, Truk, was attacked by massive air and naval forces in 1944, destroying 250 planes and a large number of ships. The Japanese subsequently moved more aircraft onto the island and it was promptly *re-*attacked, destroying its air capacity for the rest of the war. It was then bypassed, and no attempt was made to engage the (considerable) land defenses, because the Japanese infantry was unable to interfere with allied sea lanes or air operations.
Land forces can be bypassed when they are either out of supplies or so woefully inadequate that they present no threat to your own forward forces. Otherwise, going past them to get into the enemy’s rear areas leaves his forces in your own rear areas. This is why one of the classic features of castles and other strongpoints is the “sally port,” a means of exiting the castle to strike at or raid enemies in the vicinity, then retreat into the strongpoint afterward. Although it sounds like a paradox, a strongpoint with exits through which you can attack your enemies is stronger than one with no holes in it at all, even though the sally ports (or their equivalent) are vulnerable to attack.
This is the same reason modern minefields and barbed wire have lanes cleared through them (well-covered by fields of fire) – a defensive position from which one cannot counterattack is much less of a threat and much less flexible.
One thing for sure: ULTRA combined with Dönitz’ propensity to gab extensively with his skippers (the man was a bit of a back seat captain, apparently) did wonders to reduce the U-boot menace. And since wars are always won more on the logistics front than any battlefield, that’s half a victory right there.
It wasn’t so much micromanaging by Donitz as the ‘wolf pack’ procedure. The first submarine to find a convoy was supposed to back off and radio the location, so all the other nearby subs could gather and attack the convoy at once from different directions.
But of course these radio broadcasts by German subs could also be heard by the convoy, and the Allies also had a good network of radio-location stations around listening for these, and pinpointing their location.
On the issue of Ultra: the main credit for that goes to Poland. It was the Poles who cracked the Enigma codes. When Poland fell, their codebreakers were sent to Paris and London.
Double cross, in English, dates to the 1830s as a noun andthe early 1900s as a verb. In fact, Charlie Chaplin, when mocking Hitler and the Nazis in The Great Dictator, substitutes the “double cross” for the swastika.