Day Of Invasion For Overlord example essay topic

The battle of Normandy was the major turning point in the Second World War. It was a very well planned out attack of the Allies on western France against the Germans. Many people know a little about the day, but few know about the long planning, strategy, and results for both sides. At the end of November, Roosevelt and Churchill journeyed to Tehran for their first meeting with Stalin. The president and the Prime Minister had already approved, under the code name Overlord, a plan for a cross-channel attack. Roosevelt wholeheartedly favored executing Overlord as early in 1944 as the weather permitted.

Chief Meteorologist for Eisenhower said, "By the time the conference was due to start we could not expect to have a complete set of surface level and upper air charts but a handful of reports from one or two critical areas west and south-west of Ireland, if consistent among themselves, would decide the issue- the terrifying issue whether Overlord would be definitely postponed for at least 24 hours or go irrevocably forward to the assault on the coasts of France at dawn next mourning" (Stagg 100-101). At Tehran, Churchill argued for giving priority to Italy and possible new offensives in the Balkans or southern France, but he was outvoted by Roosevelt and Stalin. Overlord was set for May 1944. After the meeting, the CCS recalled Eisenhower from the Mediterranean and gave him command of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF), which was to organize and carry out Overlord. The Tehran conference marked the high point of the East-West wartime alliance.

Stalin came to the meeting as a victorious war leader; large quantities of U.S. lend-lease aid were flowing into the Soviet Union through Murmansk and the Persian Gulf; and the decision on Overlord satisfied the long-standing Soviet demand for a second front. At the same time, strains were developing as the Soviet armies approached the borders of the smaller eastern European states. In May 1943 the Germans had produced evidence linking the USSR to the deaths of some 11,000 Polish officers found buried in mass graves in the Katy n Forest near Smolensk. Stalin had severed relations with the Polish exile government in London, and he insisted at Tehran, as he had before, that the postwar Soviet-Polish boundary would have to be the one established after the Polish defeat in 1939. He also reacted with hostility to Churchill's proposal of a British-American thrust into the Balkans". Ironically Hitler seems to have been the only one who originally believed that the invasion wold take place in Normandy" (Ryan 258).

Although, Hitler expected an invasion of northwestern Europe in the spring of 1944, and he welcomed it as a chance to win the war. If he could throw the Americans and British off the beaches, he reasoned, they would not soon try again. He could then throw all of his forces, nearly half of which were in the west, against the USSR. In November 1943 he told the commanders on the eastern front that they would get no more reinforcements until after the invasion had been defeated. In January 1944 a Soviet offensive raised the siege of Leningrad and drove Army Group North back to the Narva River-Lake Peipus line. There the Germans found a tenuous refuge in the one segment of the east wall that had been to some extent fortified.

On the south flank, successive offensives, the last in March and April, pushed the Germans in the broad stretch between the Poles " ye Marshes and the Black Sea off of all but a few shreds of Soviet territory. The greater part of 150,000 Germans and Romanians in Crimea died or passed into Soviet captivity in May after a belated sea lift failed to get them out of Sevastopol'. On the other hand, enough tanks and weapons had been turned out to equip new divisions for the west and replace some of those lost in the east; the air force had 40 percent more planes than at the same time a year earlier; and synthetic oil production reached its wartime peak in April 1944. On June 6, 1944, D-Day, the day of invasion for Overlord had finally come, the U.S. First Army, under General Omar N. Bradley, and the British Second Army, under General Miles C. Dempsey, established beachheads in Normandy, on the French channel coast. "In the murky, gray light, in majestic, fearful grandeur, the great Allied fleet lay off Normandy's five invasion beaches" (Ryan 189). The German resistance was strong, and the footholds for Allied armies were not nearly as good as they had expected.

Nevertheless, the powerful counterattack with which Hitler had proposed to throw the Allies off the beaches did not materialize, neither on D-Day nor later. Enormous Allied air superiority over northern France made it difficult for Rommel, who was in command on the scene, to move his limited reserves. Moreover, Hitler became convinced that the Normandy landings were a feint and the main assault would come north of the Seine River. Consequently, he refused to release the divisions he had there and insisted on drawing in reinforcements from more distant areas. By the end of June, Eisenhower had 850,000 men and 150,000 vehicles ashore in Normandy. The battle of Normandy was a great event in the Second World War.

It helped the Allies to overcome the Germans and win the war. Even though the Germans were suspecting an attack on the western side of France the determination of the Allied forces was to great for the Germans to overcome, which resulted in the victory of World War 2. Works Cited Stagg, J.M., Forecast for Overlord. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc. Ryan, Cornelius. The Longest Day.

New York: Simon and Schuster.

Bibliography

Stagg, J.M., Forecast for Overlord. Ryan, Cornelius. The Longest Day. New York: Simon and Schuster. web web web links. html.