Placating Stalin was one reason the Allies had to invade Germany through France. All the military and political leaders remembered early 1918, when the newly-in-power Soviet government under Lenin had made a separate peace with Imperial Germany. Even though all the Allies had agreed early in WW II that no separate peace agreements would be made, the nag was always there.
Moreover, neither Roosevelt nor Churchill had any desire at all to see all Germany overrun from the east and fall under the hammer and sickle. The only way to prevent that was to place American and British soldiers on the ground inside Germany. Invasion through northern Europe was the only way to do that (Churchill’s claim that an invasion from the south, through Europe’s “soft underbelly,” proved fantastical in rolling up the Italian peninsula. Whatever Europe’s underbelly was, it wasn’t soft.)
The Allies could afford to succeed by a mere whisker on the Normandy beaches. Indeed, the planned American and British timetable for operations commencing June 7 proved wildly optimistic. But they did succeed, rather handily most places, as it turned out, and that was enough.
But any failure would have been only catastrophic. As in all major military operations, logistics was the central issue. The moon and tide conditions were acceptable on days in May, June and July; in fact, May 19 was seriously discussed as the invasion date for some time. But the Allies’ supreme commander, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, postponed the invasion to June 5 because doing so would yield him an additional 100 landing craft, mostly LSTs, used to land tracked and wheeled vehicles directly onto the beach.
A very thought-provoking article, but a few nits to pick.
As they would have been the only dog in the fight, the demands would have been hard for Roosevelt to resist.
Why? Americans were terrified of communism.
Also, is it all that obvious that Germany would have fallen to Russia had Normandy failed? If Russia could handle it all themselves, why ask for our help? Do we really think Stalin merely wanted to cut down on his losses – as if he cared about his losses at all?
I think Sensing underestimates the power of the real Plan B: atom bombs in Europe and Asia by the dozens, as fast as we could make them. Had the invasion failed like this, we most certainly would have used the atom bomb in Europe in 1945. And it probably would have deterred the Russians the same way it did when we used them on Japan. I also think Sensing underestimates the rage and primal calls for blood and destruction that would have erupted from America had so many troops been lost in Normandy. I rather think that if the Russians had taken over Western Europe, Americans would have been rather happy to use a few of them to kill 50 milllion people and stop the Cold War before it even started.
Would things be much different today? People live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki today. I’m guessing they’d be living in Berlin too.
It’s fantastic. But communism would have fallen under its own corruption at some point.