The D-Day strategy (1941) said that to defeat Hitler the US would have to land millions of troops as close to Germany as possible and then physically destroy its army with huge tank battles. That is just what the US, Britain, and Canada carried out in Operation Overlord, beginning on D-Day, June 6th 1944.
The strategy was conceived in 1941, months before the US entered the war. But it took years to get Britain on board. Britain thought it could defeat Germany by just bombing it to bits from the air. That weakened Germany but it was not delivering the death blow.
War plans: In peacetime the US military studies possible wars inside-out. Although wars rarely go according to plan, understanding the issues and trade-offs in advance makes a difference.
In the 1930s the US had war plans for fighting Germany, Mexico, Japan, Britain, and even Britain and Japan together.
Enter Albert C. Wedemeyer. In 1941 he was a lieutenant colonel at the War Plans Division. He was the brains behind D-Day. He was one of the few military officers in the English-speaking world who had studied strategy in Germany. From 1936 to 1938 he studied at Kriegsakademie, the German Staff College, giving him insight into German military thinking.
Heartland Theory was a big part of German thinking. It was proposed by British geographer Halford Mackinder in “The Geographical Pivot of History” (1904). His famous quote:
“Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.”
This was why Eastern Europe after the First World War was cut up into petty buffer states between Germany and Russia.
The 1900s belongs to land powers: With the invention of machines that could quickly cross land (rail, motor, and air transport), and with the factories to produce them in large numbers, Mackinder said the days of the British Empire (or any sea power) as top dog were over. Conditions favoured the rise of an industrialized land power of continental scale – like the US or, especially, Russia.
For Germany to become a world power it needed to take over Eastern Europe and Russia. Thus the Second World War.
For the US it meant defeating Germany before it took over Russia. To do that it had to fight Germany on land with a three-to-one advantage. That meant training and landing an army of 8.8 million men with plenty of tanks and air support. That in turn meant wiping out the German U-boats in the Atlantic and building enough new ships to carry 10 million tons. And that in turn meant women would have to work in factories to free up enough men to fight. Thus Rosie the Riveter.
(Image via Stuff Mom Never Told You)
But none of that could be ready till July 1943 at the earliest. In practice it took till June 1944. Which meant the US had to help Russia stay in the war till then – and keep Japan at bay. Without the victories at Midway and Stalingrad there might not have been a D-Day.
– Abagond, 2019.
Source: mainly Google Images and “Six Armies in Normandy” (1994) by John Keegan.
See also:
- geographical thinking
- Mackinder
- guns, germs and steel
- Second World War
- battles
- Midway
- Stalingrad
- D-Day
- leaders
- France
- US
571
Does this source examine how the US military strategy played out in the Korean and Vietnam wars and in Israel and Kuwait?
After this book, has any book examined the evolution of the military strategy since the 90s?
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That impact wrench the lady is holding might be better than anything made after. Would love to have it.
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@ jefe
The source only goes up to the fall of the Iron Curtain.
A book that looks at how US military strategy has changed over time from 1945 to 2010 is “Washington Rules” (2010) by Andrew J. Bacevich. Despite all the new technology and supposed paradigm shifts, Bacevich says the US in the long term learned next to nothing from the Vietnam War. Now that I think of it, it slipped into Ancient History right on schedule: 2003.
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