Could World War II Have Ended Sooner than It Did?

[Geee]

National Review:

Seventy-one years ago, the British, Canadians, and Americans landed on the Normandy beaches to open a second ground front against Nazi Germany.

 

Operation Overlord — the Allied invasion of Western Europe — proved the largest amphibious operation in military history, dwarfing even Xerxes’s Persian invasion of Greece in 480 B.C.

 

Brilliant planning, overwhelming naval support, air superiority, and high morale ensured the successful landing of 160,000 troops on the first day — at a cost of about 4,000 dead.

Three weeks after the June 6 landings, nearly a million Allied soldiers were ashore, heading eastward through France. Hitler’s once-formidable Third Reich seemed on the verge of collapse.

On the Eastern Front, the German army was imploding under the weight of 5 million advancing infantrymen of Russia’s Red Army. At the same time, Allied four-engine bombers, with superb long-range fighter escorts, at last were beginning to destroy German transportation and fuel infrastructure.

Yet Hitler held off for another eleven bloody months. Why?

[Valin]

 

Allied planners had never found a way to recapture intact the key French ports on the Atlantic Coast from besieged German defenders.

 

The farther Patton and other Allied armies advanced from the beaches, almost 400 miles away, the longer their supply lines grew — and the easier it became for the enemy to support its own retreating forces.

 

"Amateurs talk tactics, Dilettantes talk strategy, Professionals talk logistics."

Unknown

 

One might also point out the WWII Wehrmacht was a pretty damn good army.....when a certain corporal left them alone.

 

What is it about dictators, that as soon as they put on a uniform they think they're Sun Tzu, Julius Caesar, and Napoléon Bonaparte on steroids.