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The American Way Of War

American Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill inspect U.S. troops in England in March 1944. Washington believed invasion of France was the best choice among strategies to win the war. London went along only because, faced with American insistence, it felt it had no other choice.

Britain Feared The U.S. Plan: A Direct Assault

In the newsreels from Normandy Americans and Britons fought as one - comrades-in-arms, marching shoulder to shoulder in a great crusade. So much for the newsreels. In real life, the Americans all but dragged the British ashore.

Today, from our perch on history's timeline, Normandy (or something like it) seems to have been inevitable: a grand, decisive battle to settle things for once and for all. But the Allies decided only late in the game to start this grand, decisive battle rolling. As for shoulder to shoulder - well, for most of the war, it was more a matter of toe to toe.

Impatiently: The Americans

Not long after Pearl Harbor, an obscure American general stuck away in a desk job scribbled out his frustration with the war's course. "We've got to go to Europe and fight - and we've got to quit wasting resources all over the world," he wrote. "We've got to begin slugging with air at West Europe; to be followed by a land attack as soon as possible."

The words were as American as their author, Dwight D. Eisenhower. They summed up the American approach to World War II: Pile on and get it over with. After all, piling on was the way U.S. Grant had won the Civil War. Grant's campaigns lacked the elegant touch; he believed in by-God battering the enemy to death.

Which makes sense. The strategy of piling on played to America's strong point, its mass-production economy. America's factories could churn out all the brute force needed to hammer an enemy to death. American strategists zeroed in on France as the best place to pile on. France housed the biggest number of German soldiers for American firepower to kill, and France offered the shortest road into Germany itself.

Piling on also helped to make up for America's problem points.

The Germans had a long tradition of military elegance; the green American citizen-soldiers would have to compensate with brawn.

On the home front, the American people have never tolerated long wars. They want to get it over with, get the boys back home. Anything more time-consuming than piling on would try the public’s patience, and America’s generals didn’t dare test it. "A democracy cannot fight a Seven Year’s War,” said the Army's wartime chief of staff, Gen. George C. Marshall. He died before Vietnam would prove his point.

Reluctantly: The British

The British knew in their heart that at some point, they'd have to face the German army in France. Trouble is, the British had done exactly that 30 years earlier, to their vast sorrow. That was in World War I, the mud of which sucked down an entire generation of Britons in battles like the Somme. Never before had Britain shipped a large army to the continent. Never again, the British said.

Winston Churchill fretted in his dramatic way about the Channel's running red with blood. One of Churchill's advisers told Marshall with a sigh, "You must remember you are fighting our losses on the Somme." The British wanted to put off any crossing until the weight of war exhausted Germany. But the British were vague about how it would happen - through bombing, maybe, or economic blockade, or uprisings in the German-occupied countries.

Meanwhile, the British would fight the Germans in their own style, one dubbed "indirection." Rather than bash head-on into the Germans, the British preferred to nip at them around the edges.

This marginal warfare would play to Britain's big equalizer, the Royal Navy. The navy could put packets of British soldiers ashore in places where the Germans might find it hard to reinforce, like the Mediterranean. And if the indirect approach took a long time - well, said the British, what of it? Why rush into disaster in France? Let's take the war as it comes.

The Americans had little patience with this opportunistic approach. Without a timetable, the Americans asked, how can we build a war machine? Industry and manpower had to be synchronized, and synchronization demanded some sort of master plan. Anyway, the Americans smelled an imperial rat. The path to the British Empire in India and beyond ran through the Mediterranean. To the Americans, that explained a lot of the British taste for indirection on the southern rim of Europe.

Field Marshal Ewrin Rommel, in charge of the German defenses against invasion, inspects the Atlantic Wall. To the Allies, Rommel was Hitler's best general, the commander who could do more with less. The Allies had beaten him in North Africa only by using much more: more guns, more tanks, more planes, more men. Their stategy for France was the same.

For two years, when British military power still outweighed what the Americans could bring to bear, the British prevailed. In 1942, with a better grasp of what was possible, the British steered the Americans away from France and into North Africa.

In 1943, with a slicker sense of politics, the British steered the Americans away from France and into Sicily and Italy. But by 1944, the balance of brawn had tipped to the Americans. They told Churchill: No more indirection. We're going to France in '44, in all the strength we can muster.

Uncertainly: The Germans

As early as September 1941, Germany's top generals in France were calling for concrete. Their fading daydream of invading Britain had finally dried up and blown away. The reason: Germany's war against the Soviet Union was bleeding off the Reich's military strength.

By March 1942, Adolf Hitler had resigned himself to hunkering down defensively in the West. Even after the Soviet Union began pressing the Germans back, Hitler looked nervously westward, as well he might.

On the Eastern Front, the Germans had a lot of space to trade off. In the West, Europe is more compact; London sits only 300 miles from the Ruhr, Germany's industrial heart. Late in 1943, Hitler gave first priority to his Atlantic Wall. He sensed that if the Allies could bull their way ashore, his war would be lost. He realized that the war's decisive battle would be fought somewhere along the coast. The problem was in figuring out where.

D-Day Code Name: Overlord. Commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Normandy invasion, this program combines archival images - including rare color footage - with the recollections of participants to present the entire event. Each disk in this 3-DVD set presents a different phase: first you'll trace The Build Up leading to D-Day, then follow the actual event in The Invasion, and finally, see The Breakout which discusses the aftermath.

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