There was no Operation Sledgehammer.
The reason for that is because we realised how disastrous that would have been, so Britain's far more sensible Operation Torch was carried out instead.
The US bailed the Brits out of N. Africa.
The North African Campaign was won by Operation Torch (that British idea the Yanks were initially against, because they preferred their own Operation Sledgehammer, which would have been an unmitigated disaster had it been carried out) and by the British codebreakers at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire.
It is estimated that 40% to 60% of Axis supply shipping in North Africa was located and destroyed due to decrypted information. Heavy losses of German paratroopers in Crete, made possible by Ultra warnings of the drop times and locations, meant that Hitler hesitated to attack Malta, which aided the British in gaining control of the Mediterranean, as did the defeat of the Italian Navy at the Battle of Cape Matapan.
The US was in charge of the Normandy invasions.
Actually, my old mucker, D-Day was almost entirely planned by the British. Who was it who made most of the ammunition; who packed the parachutes; who manned the ops rooms; who created the maps; who invented the ingenious Mulberry harbours? Yep, it was the British.
Yet on the day, every such fear was confounded. And for all the critical contribution of the United States, this (D-Day) was the last great operation of the war in which the British took the lion’s share, and earned a lion’s share of the credit.
Think of the myriad British people involved, from the women industrial workers who made the ammunition to the WAAFs who packed parachutes, the WRNS who manned ops rooms.
Then there were the high commanders. General Sir Bernard Montgomery had been a celebrity since his victory at El Alamein in November 1942, but he was also intensely controversial — hated by the Americans, who thought him slow in action, unforgivably rude and patronising in speech.
But, under Dwight Eisenhower’s nominal Supreme Command, the operational plan for D-Day was overwhelmingly Monty’s. He directed both the landings and subsequent campaign ashore.
Normandy, France, June 1944. A composite aerial photograph of a 'Mulberry' artificial harbour - an ingenious British innovation - at the beach head after the landings on June 6, 1944
Even most of his critics conceded that nobody else could have done it better, from the moment early in 1944 when he insisted that the number of troops attacking on the first day should be doubled, whatever the difficulties about finding extra shipping to carry them.
Then there were the staff, thousands of officers often caricatured as boring blimps, almost all civilians in uniform, who worked for months in dreary huts and offices, converting the great plan into reality.
Millions of maps had to be printed in conditions of absolute secrecy; 25 square miles of south Devon cleared of the civilian population to enable amphibious training; arrangements made to ship two million men, 200,000 vehicles, 4,000 tanks and 6,000 artillery pieces from Britain to France.
British workmen built the huge artificial Mulberry harbours which Churchill himself had conceived, to be towed in sections to France and shelter both British and American supply vessels offloading from volatile Channel weather during the first weeks after the landings.
Clever British geeks devised a compound of grease, lime and asbestos fibres to waterproof vehicles. Others designed what were known as ‘the funnies’ — tanks modified to swim, or carry fascines (rolled-up bundles of wood) to bridge ditches, mortars to destroy pillboxes, flame-throwers and flails to explode mines.
Curiously the Americans, usually the most mechanically-minded people on earth, spurned these Limey gadgets — and paid a heavy price for doing so when The Day came on the beaches.
The intelligence planners – again, overwhelmingly British amid American scepticism – forged the superlative Operational Fortitude, the greatest deception in history, to keep the Germans guessing first about where the invasion would come, and later about whether another landing would follow elsewhere.
Operation Fortitude required collaboration between the code decrypters of Bletchley Park, the MI5 officers controlling German double-agents in Britain, the RAF’s reconnaissance squadrons and thousands of army signals personnel impersonating dummy units, which were used to deceive the Germans on troop positions.
It worked brilliantly: Hitler kept vital forces in the Pas-de-Calais — well to the north of the Normandy beaches — until August, amid his high command’s chronic uncertainty about what the Allies might do next.
Then there was the Royal Navy, led by the brilliant Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay. Having controlled the 1940 Dunkirk evacuation, he now directed the huge fleet of warships, transport and landing craft which bore the armies to France.
In advance of the landings, late in January a British midget submarine — known as an X-craft — carried two secret swimmers into the beaches by night.
A sapper named Captain Scott-Bowden and Sergeant Bruce Ogden Smith, a member of the Special Boat Section from a famous family of fishing-tackle makers, probed the sand with auger drills within yards of German sentries before returning home bearing samples so it could be established whether the target beaches could take the weight of the tanks.
At dawn on June 6, X-craft again played a role, providing beacons to guide the armada inshore, while thousands of sailors directed landing craft and manned the guns of bombarding warships. Overhead, hundreds of squadrons of RAF bombers and fighters spearheaded the huge air operation in support of the assault.
The word hero is often foolishly abused to describe anybody who took part in the Second World War, whether wielding a pen as an Army office clerk at Aldershot, or enduring the whitest heat of battle as an infantryman.
On June 6, 1944, British genius and courage held the forefront as the forces of freedom took the first great stride towards the liberation of Western Europe.
Raise a glass today, to the memory of all those magnificent men, from the boffins, planners and industrial workers to the aircrew, soldiers and sailors, from Winston Churchill through John Howard to Stan Hollis, who did very great things to make possible the triumph of June 6, 1944.
They were, indeed, the Best of British.
There was however a Dieppe and an Operation Market Garden. Both of which were Briddish ideas and complete disasters.
Operation Sledgehammer was a Yank idea, yet that would have made Dieppe and Operation Market Garden look like teddy bear's picnics, so the British were hardly ther only ones who came out with bad ideas during the war.
Operation Sledgehammer was eagerly pressed for by both the United States military and the Soviet Union, but it was never actually carried out as it was finally realised that it was wholly impractical at that period in time, an assessment which was indicated by the Dieppe Raid of August 1942. Instead, Britain's idea of Operation Torch was carried out, to huge success.
As for Operation Dieppe - which has been called "the wrong execution of the right idea" - the British performed quite well in that operation and had some success. It was the Canadians who let us down.
Saved your butts in WWI too!
Sorry, but no. You entered the war towards its end, and you were so short of equipment you had to borrow off the British. By the time America entered the war Britain and France were gaining the upper hand against the Hun, thanks in no small part to yet another piece of British ingenuity - the tank. This helped to smash the stalemate in the trenches and propelled Britain and France towards victory.
The Japanese caught the Brits by surprise too and drove your sorry azzes out of the Pacific! The brits didn't return until 1945 and after the US drove the Japanese back to their home islands.
The British had most of their resources back in Europe. Britain was in a fight for its life against Germany and Italy. The British saw defeating Germany and Italy in Europe as being far more important than defending Malaya and Singapore.
Don't be silly. Your island was ripe for the picking and what saved the Brits was Hitler invading the Soviet Union.
What saved the British was the British preventing the Germans gaining air superiority over them during the Battle of Britain. This then forced Adolf to cancel Operation Sea Lion, the planned amphibious and airborne invasion of Britain. This took place before America was in the war and before the Soviet Union joined the Allies.
It was the first major defeat of Germany during the war and it was inflicted by the British.
Air battles over the Pacific were a daily occurrence. Even the Soviets scoffed at those handful of dog fights that the brits in their pompous arrogance called a battle. It was a sideshow worthy of a foot note.
The Battle of Britain was not only the second-largest air battle of WWII after the Battle of Kursk it still remains the second-largest air battle in history.
D-Day was led by US General Eisenhower.
Eisenhower's "leadership" of the campaign was mainly symbolic. The real powers behind the campaign were Montogomery, who led the Allied land forces; Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, who led the Allied air forces; and Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay was in charge of the Allied Naval Expeditionary Force of the campaign. It's all there in the history literature. Look it up. It'll only take you a few minutes.
Monty should have been sacked. He was the worse general in WWII.
What absolute bollocks.
Monty was a man who picked up 22 honours and awards, including many from grateful nations, such as the Grand Cross of the Order of the White Lion from Czechoslovakia; the Grand Cross of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav; the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour from France; and was made a Knight of the Order of the Elephant by Denmark.
On June 13th 1946, the French even named the Norman commune of Colleville-sur-Orne as Colleville-Montgomery to honour the man who commanded the Invasion of Normandy.
There are two towns, Calvados Sainte-Foy-de-Montgomery and Saint-Germain-de- Montgomery in the area, but they are named for Montgomery's family ancestors. They were part of William the Conqueror's invading Norman army in 1066 and settled in England.
This is your problem Blackleaf, you believe in myths, he never made that comment, ever.
Have you got any evidence from your rather dubious assertion?
E S, I sometimes wonder why you bother arguing with this pompous briddish horse and donkey mix......
I don't know why he bothers, either. He usually loses.
