Suggest you have a look at:
http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=641846
mainly because it tries to look at the campaign with fresh eyes.
There were not many different campaign options for the Allies; a single strong landing, followed by a battle of attrition to the point where the Germans could no longer hold a continuous front, and an advance to the culmination point; rinse and repeat. Minor differences will generate different German responses but not change the overall picture.
There is also the distorting effect of history - before the landings IIRC Churchill was talking about the liberation of Paris in 1944 as an improbable event. The campaign while uninspiring in hindsight was seen differently at the time.
The major Allied weaknesses were probably not enough concentration of force, and lack of understanding the importance of logistics.
Ending the war sooner really depends on the timing of a Rhine crossing (you don't want to attempt it in the winter months) and so the delay of D-Day from early May made a huge difference.
A lot to unpack, but it is not just generalship. There is admiralty and air power to consider. Both of these factors are constrained by
logistics, geography and technology. In 1944, an amphibious attack was restricted to how much operational radius your fighter line had from its forward support bases, your fuel delivery, your ship to shore per mile/kilometer of beach you could land upon and the relative speed of reinforcement by freighters versus enemy reinforcement by trucks. Note that not all shoreline is capable of ship to shore infantry transfer; (about 8% of France's north coast is the right kind of sand shelf), and even at that the terrain behind is horrible for mobile operations (marshes and high ground) so you only get a 3 or 4 places at most between Calais and Brest and none of them more than 70 km long in continuous stretch.
Then you have to confront that if you did it right,
it means you tore up the infrastructure behind the defender so that it is a transportation desert for him and you. Once you are ashore, it comes down to your trucks versus his trucks and comparable march rates and reaches. The Germans have decent trucks and lots of horses and are on defense. If you are a Wally, and American you have decent trucks, but your English ally goofed
and half of his trucks are garbage so you have to split your logistics park. This is a problem as you have to generate 6 to 1 firepower at the point of contact to shove the Germans back. That is a lot of ammunition. By the way, should I mention that a couple of Kentucky contractors (crooks) have supplied the American Army in France with 35% dud shells in divisional artillery calibers?
I know, but I'm not convinced. The enemy is less mobile than me, so why should I help him by placing as many forces as I can in the same spot?
See above. Geography constrains where you can land. Your logistics better be designed to generate maximum F=MA at the points of limited contact.
Studying these things on the game board is tricky. Trying to keep things aligned with reality in our military map and field exercises was always a problem. During my own career in amphibious/littoral warfare there was a ongoing debate over concentration vs dispersed operations. It was never settled. In that venue & in gaming out a invasion of Europe the sucess is strictly situational, & depends heavily on how wrong the enemy is about your intent and capability. Part of the sucess of OVERLORD (the string of campaigns, not the landing) was the German expectation there would be multiple landings, and their locations. Allied deception ops worked very well in that regard. The residual German reserves were very much in the wrong places when Op DRAGOON was executed. On the game board it appears earlier, smaller, and more invasion points work better than a single 'colossal crack' later. BUT, this depends in part on how the defending player miscalculates the attackers intent & capability.
As I understand it navally and airpower, there were only two spots, Pas de Calais and along the north shore of the Cotentin Peninsula. There were no other viable options based on the logistics and air basing arrays available. If the Germans were to be misdirected it had to be Pas de Calais. All the other bait was never going to work. Hence the Patton deception.
I strongly suspect the same applies to the latter portions of the campaign in western Europe. What SHAEF & others sometimes refered to as OVERLORD II, or after D+90. On the game board I've pulled off Montys '40 Division Full Blooded Thrust', entirely because the defender thought the Allied team was going for a broad front strategy & entirely failed to see the single axis attack coming. Generally its easier to organize & pull off a series of multiple axis attacks across the entire front. The defender has some really tough choices about the proportion of response & can swiftly screw himself with too much or too little in different sectors.
The French rail system was torn up with a vengeance. The French road network was also a shambles. The Wallies operated off a fleet of trucks (See above for how that worked out.). I cannot see how the graduates of Carlisle could have done anything differently. I don't think the British ever understood the nuts and bolts of logistics all too well. Certainly the Americans scrambled for every liter of gas and every kilogram of ammunition they could steal from each other. It is a myth that the Wallies were well supplied. They had hardscrabble logistics the moment they got out of the bocage country. I will have a lot negative to say about some of the mistakes the Wallies made in the pursuit phase in a bit.
I'm not at all certain either is superior. its wholly dependant on what Hitler & Co were thinking at the moment & how they react. I strongly suspect that with a sucessful deception operation either will work equally well.
Based on the geography, what they did RTL, was their only option. They only had 2 choices and only a 50% chance of getting it correct. They were lucky the Germans took the bait.
In general they had a MUCH better understanding of the importance of logistics than the Germans.
Correct. But even so, they should have paid attention to shortening their sea and land lines of communications as much as possible. Antwerp was more important than crossing the Rhine in September for example. Cut off a whole week of Red Ball travel from Normandy to the fronts if the seaports were 400 km away instead of 1100 km, ya know? BAD GENERALSHIP not to understand the time/fuel/load factors involved.
Yup. Multipule axis attacks was core Red Army doctrine. It worked.
Badly. 9 million combat deaths.
I used to umpire war-games. Usually with some level of limited intelligence. The players had some restriction on the information concerning the enemy. No where near as much restriction as a real world commander has to struggle with, but enough to create some thin fog. I was always amused by how aggressive game players and masters of military strategy turned into indecisive paralytics without the usual perfect view of the game board.
Agreed. I had to factor in numbers and when you have "variables" instead of integrals, Mr. Uncertainty becomes mighty important. Do you pursue as hard as you can, or do you take the time and casualties to reduce garrisoned Channel ports? It looks obvious in retrospect, but if your experience is that the Germans never collapse and reconstitute with amazing rapidity, then after Falaise you may decide pursuit as far as fast and as hard as you can is your best option and hang the Channel ports. Not a criticism, but an observation that one goes with experience and hopes one guesses correctly.
This is much like hindsight, and having a book or two and some History Channel episodes on the subject. I have to wonder how many folks would do half as well if dropped into the reality of the command they comment on? If they'd even recognize it as what they'd seen documented on TV?
Agreed.
Thanks for the answers, peeps.
I'd like to ask if the Allies could have bypassed the Germans?
I know Sun Tzu advocated for avoiding multiple 'unnecessary' battles, opting to bypass enemies. I think the Soviet plans for WW3 also emphasized bypassing German cities to avoid being bogged down in urban fighting.
Geography, logistics and technology dictates choice. See above comments about bypassing the Channel ports. Up until Antwerp it makes sense. But you NEED Antwerp if you are truck supplied and if your truck park is critically short by 20% as the Wallies. There is no way around it, either in casualties or in logistics.
I think there were some cases where the Allies ignored German garrisons like some coastal French towns and cities, which became besieged until the end of WWII. Heck Paris was supposed to have been bypassed since Eisenhower didn't want to do a Stalingrad-in-West. Of course the city was liberated by its populace with minimal resistance. Wondering if Eisenhower should have done the same elsewhere.
Give the French proper credit. It was a miracle Paris was not turned into another Caen.
Not enough fighter plane support for landing there. Airbases in Sardinia and Corsica were too far and too few. Let's keep in mind that the allies were afraid of German aerial attacks even in Normandy 44 and then they had complete superiority and 3-4 thousand fighter planes operating from southern England. If the allies landed in southern France in 43 (they would have to capture Sardinia and Corsica first and build airbases there, and they could hardly invade these before July/August 43. And even then there would not be enough airbase capacities.
For Dragoon that applies. For the equivalent problem in northern France, what is the operational combat radius of a Tempest or a Thunderbolt again? 550 km?
The fear is that in autumn of 43 Germany had 13 fighter Geschwadern with c. 1500 fighter planes. If they concentrated 800-1000 fighter planes and hundreds of bombers and fighter bombers in southern France for an attack against the invasion fleet, it would be a massacre. An example of such concentrated air attack would be operation Bodenplatte, this time against a fraction of allied fighter planes.
Which is why the RAF Bomber Command and USAAF 8th and 15th air forces had to fight over central Germany. The Luftwaffe had to die there so Wallie infantry could stumble ashore on D-Day. Bodenplatte was a blip. It amounted to a 3 day delay. The LW had no chance after August 1944 when the Wallies had TACair on the continent in force.
After all Market Garden showed this narrow strategy could go belly up very fast indeed.
Discussed this above. I think a push on Antwerp (narrow front) might have been justified given West Front early Sept. 1944. Montgomery did not see it. He had his reasons. I don't think those were good reasons given what the Wallies knew then about their precarious logistics, but that is only my opinion. YMMV and it probably should. If MG had worked, I think the Wallies would still have stalled just NE of Arnhem and we would have seen fighting in the eastern Netherlands all winter.
Invade Southern France in late '43 and use it to cut off the bulk of German troops in Northern Italy if at all possible. Stop any advance into Italy at the Foggia line north of Naples but south of Rome, come down on them from the North and gut Italian industry while cutting off the bulk of German defenders. Pour men into France and turn the entire Normandy/cross-channel landing into a farce. Push harder into Southern Germany/Austria/western Baklans and ensure a liberated France with a possible Iron Curtain at the Vistula and Danube. Perhaps a German surrender in August 1944 as Berlin falls with Japan getting a Soviet landing on Hokkaido before year's end. Korra may stay whole while we get a Japan divided at the Naka or even Tone river (the latter makes a divided Tokyo easy given that it runs through the city).
The terrain and the logistics in Italy say no. It would be like MacArthur's lunatic plan to form
a halt line halfway across Kyushu during Olympic. Once you attack, you keep attacking through to final decision so that you can free up forces for use into the main event. I blame Mark Clark for screwing it up once he cracked the Volturno line.
