The Strategy of the Allies on D-Day

In the years since 1945, it has become increasingly evident that the alliance between the British and the United States was often in disagreement over the correct strategy to insure the final defeat of the Axis powers. Early on, both British and American staffs could agree that Germany represented a greater military threat than Japan, but they did not often see eye to eye on the strategy that would most efficiently defeat them. The Americans were early and persistent advocates of a direct strategy, a cross-channel attack that would first destroy German military in the West, and then drive deep into the heart of industrial Germany to end the war. The British, on the other hand, preferred to stage a number of small-scale attacks around the perimeter of fortress Europe. They thereby hoped to weaken German defenses before leaping precipitously across the channel into the teeth of the still powerful German Forces. The British simply could not afford the staggering losses entailed in a frontal assault on the northwest coast of Europe. British Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morgan, Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander (COSSAC), ststed that "Certain British authorities instinctively recoiled from the whole affair, as well they might, for fear of the butcher bill." It is not surprising, then, that the harder the Americans pressed in 1942 and 1943 for a firm commitment on a cross-channel attack, the more the British seemed to fight against it. After a debate lasting through moat of 1942, the Americans agreed to postpone any cross-channel attack because of the landings in North Africa, Operation Torch. The strategic outcome of Operation Torch was what American Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall had predicted. Success in Tunisia, which was the first the Allies had experienced against the Germans, inspired Churchill and his Chief of the Imperial Staff, Field Marshal Alan Brooke, to devise a strategy aimed at knocking Italy out of the war and at