Geographical location and a different philosophy of waging war gave the British a different outlook on the nature, timing, and location of the Second Front against Germany. At the time of the initial staff talks, the United Kingdom had already been at war for some two years and had suffered grievous losses during the Battle of France, the Battle of Britain, and the Battle of the Atlantic. Even as the famous Eighth Army began its successful march across North Africa after the battle of El Alamein, it was clear that the British lived in a world of ever-declining resources. Certainly from 1943 onward, their forces would never be as strong tomorrow as they were today, because the limits of British and Commonwealth manpower had been reached. It was also true that the British were forever confronted with the specter of the Somme. Politically, militarily, practically, and in humanitarian terms, it was unthinkable that Britain should again suffer the enormous casualties that she had borne in the 1914—18 war. The notion of attacking carefully prepared fortifications along the French coast struck many conscientious soldiers as being potentially as costly as any of the great assaults of World War I.
British political and military leaders were therefore inclined to be extremely cautious. They certainly were in favor of an invasion of Europe but only when the time was right; when circumstances were in the Allies’ favor. They could not, many held, afford to be repulsed. If the invasion failed for any of the many possible dangers inherent in such a risky operation, then, at least from the British point of view, there could be no second try. Churchill and his commanders accordingly had the tendency to define favorable circumstances very precisely.
The British were also historically a maritime power, and their entire experience in dealing with a hostile continental military power - chiefly the wars of the French Revolution and of Napoleon - inclined them to a sea power solution. The result was that many preferred to draw a blockade, a net of steel, around the Axis and gradually pull it tighter and tighter, nibbling away with the army at exposed bits of Axis military strength. At the end, following the successful naval battles of the Atlantic and the bombing campaign which British leaders agreed were necessary preconditions for the assault, Germany would be debilitated and weak. A single, powerful blow would then be enough.
The British further counseled caution because they had a more recent, more extensive, and generally more sobering understanding of amphibious operations than the American allies, whose last important landing had been during their civil war, and who, it was possible to argue, had never conducted an opposed amphibious landing at all. British planners well understood that the English Channel, however narrow at various points, was a formidable barrier that had stopped Napoleon and, more recently, the technically sophisticated Germans. More to the point was their own World War I landing at Gallipoli, which warned of the high costs of attacking a hostile shore, and appeared to show that well-organized defenses could contain even successful landings.
Carefully studied between the two world wars, Gallipoli convinced thoughtful soldiers that the defender would always be able to bring up reinforcements faster than the attacker could build up his forces on the invasion beaches, and would likewise be better able to supply and support those forces than the attacker. Amphibious landings were by nature always frontal assaults, very much like those that characterized fighting on the
Western Front; although without the advantages of extensive artillery support, the availability of reserves, and attacks launched from prepared positions. The British experience on the Western Front had been grim; how much worse, then, a frontal attack that arose from the waves? It was the lessons learned from the 1942 attack on the French port of Dieppe (Operation Jubilee), however, that worried invasion planners most.
British forces had launched minor raids on the French coast almost from the moment of the evacuation of the army from Dunkirk. In August 1942, Lord Louis Mountbatten’s Combined Operations headquarters passed from mere raids to a deliberate, large-scale invasion of Dieppe. The intention was never to hold the beachhead, but to test military and naval cooperation; the use of combined arms in large-scale landings of infantry and armored troops; and the organization of air forces in obtaining and maintaining control of the air over invasion beaches. Mountbattens operation was also to test a new piece of equipment, the Landing Craft, Tank (LCT), to see whether it could place tanks direcdy on the beaches, thus enabling assault forces to take a port by direct frontal assault.
The August 19 landings, conducted largely with soldiers of Canadian 2nd Division, although about one thousand British troops and some fifry US Rangers also took part, were an unmitigated tactical failure. German resistance was unexpectedly fierce. Within nine hours of the assault, British commanders were forced to withdraw the survivors under heavy pressure from the defenders. Almost one thousand soldiers died in the attack and around two thousand were left on the battlefield as prisoners of war. Of the 6,100 men in the assault force, only 2,500 returned to England. If Dieppe was a dry run for the eventual invasion of France, its high casualty lists made British planners’ blood run cold. Ordinary German garrison troops, it turned out, and not elite formations, had repulsed the Canadian attack. One of the chief lessons of Dieppe was thus that a large naval bombardment force was essential to crack the prepared defenses of any hostile shore, and the accumulation of that force awaited the winning of critical naval battles in the Atlantic and elsewhere. Clearly, the lessons of GalUpoli still applied. There was not much subtlety to amphibious assaults, and overwhelming force was essential if there was to be any hope of success.
The consequence of all these considerations was that the British always appeared willing to explore alternate strategies and points of attack that would enable the alliance to hit the enemy where circumstances offered.
Rather than adhering strictly to a carefully conceived and, as they saw it, excessively rigid, plan. Senior American officers and their staff planners tended to see Churchills perpetual willingness to entertain other objectives than the cross-channel attack as an unwillingness to conduct that operation at all. Even as the English-speaking nations marshaled their forces for their joint war against Germany, the suspicions of which Sun Tzu had written so many centuries before began whisperingly to penetrate the structure of an alliance both Churchill and Roosevelt regarded as unshakable.
World History
