Re: I like Ike

Posted by oldtanker on October 15, 2018 at 11:27:27 from (66.228.255.59):

In Reply to: I like Ike posted by Ultradog MN on October 14, 2018 at 09:03:30:

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Actually if you do a little research Roosevelt was against action in Italy. The only reason that we went with at all was to try to take some pressure off the Russians. Stupid plan. Germany dumped a minimum of assets in Italy because the terrain was terrible! And Italy wasn't Churchill's first choice for the soft under belly. Italy would have to be secured to go with Churchill's first pick. And it would have been worse than Italy as far as terrain goes. And all of those plans were designed to preserve England's colonies. Roosevelt had already made it plain to Churchill that England was going to eventually give up it's colonies. But Churchill understood that for England to be a major player on the world stage they had to retain the colonies. England had no colonies in Europe but they did in North Africa, the Mid East and India among other places. So they needed the Mediterranean basin secure. It would also be advantageous to England to curtail the Germans ability to attack shipping there.

Considering the losses suffered in Italy Marshal was wrong. What happened is Roosevelt wanted to keep Stalin in the war. He wanted to make the cross channel invasion in 43. BEFORE Rommel took over the "Atlantic wall". Considering that we had the assets to invade Italy they most likely would have been successful in France at the time. They had about 189,000 troops going into Italy and another 800,000 or so in England. In the time that elapsed between then and 1944. Other than the port areas the Germans didn't start on the Atlantic Wall until after the invasion of Italy. That extra 7 or 8 months they gave the Germans in France cost a lot of lives. They built fortifications like mad using slave labor and dramatically increased the number of troops.

What happened was that Marshal who liked and respected the Brits allowed himself to be convinced by the British military and intel that a cross channel invasion would fail in 1943 and he helped convince Roosevelt to go along with Churchill. Ike went with the flow. Had they listened to US intel and insisted perhaps the war in Europe would have been over a year earlier. Because of those decisions of which Ike was part of somewhere between 60 and 70 THOUSAND allied servicemen died in Italy and another 37,000 in the battle of Normandy. In Italy the Germans employed less that 439,000 soldiers at the peak. The allies 1.3 million. And total? About 800 more allies died than did those fighting for the axis. The terrain in Italy is an attackers nightmare.

Churchill wanted the invasion to to be into present day Solvenia then for it to fight through what was then the Yugoslavian, Austrian and German Alps to get into Germany. Keep in mind to make the "2nd front" work Italy had to be taken to prevent a German assault on the invasion forces from air bases in Italy. What that plan would have done was draw German forces in preventing a possible attack on the Mid East. It would have also failed IMO. The terrain like in Italy would have made it a disaster!

Rick

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