Overlord D-day And the Battle for Normandy

Chapter I "MUCH THE GREATEST THING WE HAVE EVER ATTEMPTED" Not the least remarkable aspect of the Second World War was the manner in which the United States, which might have been expected to regard the campaign in Europe as a diversion from the struggle against her principal aggressor, Japan, was persuaded to commit her chief strength in the west. Not only that, but from December 1941 until June 1944 it was the Americans who were passionately impatient to confront the German army on the continent while the British, right up to the eve of D-Day, were haunted by the deepest misgivings about doing so. "Why are we trying to do this?" cried Winston Churchill in a bitter moment of depression about Operation OVERLORD in February 1944,* which caused in him a spasm of enthusiasm for an alternative Allied landing in Portugal. "I am very uneasy about the whole operation," wrote the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke, as late as 5 June 1944. "At the best, it will come very far short of the expectations of the bulk of the people, namely all those who know nothing about its difficulties. At its worst, it may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war."* Had the United States army been less resolute in its commitment to a landing in Normandy, it is most unlikely that this would have taken place before 1945. Until the very last weeks before OVERLORD was launched, its future was the subject of bitter dissension and debate between the warlords of Britain and America. For a year following the fall of France in 1940, Britain fought on without any rational prospect of final victory. Only when Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941, the most demented of his strategic decisions, did the first gleam of hope at last present itself to enemies of the Axis. For the remainder of that year, Britain was preoccupied with the struggle to keep open her Atlantic lifeline, to build her bomber offensive into a meaningful menace to Germany, and to keep hopes alive in the only theatre of war where the British army could fightAfrica and the Middle East. Then, in the dying days of the year, came the miracle of Pearl Harbor. Britain's salvation, the turning point of the war, was confirmed four days later by another remarkable act of German recklessness: Hitler's declaration of war upon the United States. The outcome of the Second World War was never thereafter in serious doubt. But great delays and difficulties lay ahead in mobilizing America's industrial might for the battlefield, and in determining by what strategy the Axis was to be crushed. To the relief of the British, President Roosevelt and his Chiefs of Staff at once asserted their acceptance of the principle of "Germany first". They acknowledged that her war-making power was by far the most dangerous and that following her collapse, Japan must soon capitulate. The war in the Pacific became overwhelmingly the concern of the United States navy. The principal weight of the army's ground forces, which would grow to a strength of eight million men, was to be directed against Germany and Italy. This decision was confirmed at ARCADIA, the first great Anglo-American conference of the war that began in Washington on 31 December 1941. America committed herself to BOLERO, a programme for a vast build-up of her forces in Britain. Churchill, scribbling his own exuberant hopes for the future during the Atlantic passage to that meeting, speculated on a possible landing in Europe by 40 Allied armoured divisions in the following year: "We might hope to win the war at the end of 1943 or 1944."* But in the months after ARCADIA, as the first United States troops and their senior officers crossHastings, Max is the author of 'Overlord D-day And the Battle for Normandy', published 2006 under ISBN 9780307275714 and ISBN 030727571X.