#Who won d day free
It was a real possibility that we could have looked back on June 6, 1944, as the day that hope for a free world died. Dwight Eisenhower told his staff, “I hope to God I know what I’m doing.” I wish to God it were safely over.” Supreme Allied commander Gen. At the worst it may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war. At the best it will fall so very, very short of the expectations of the bulk of the people, namely all those who know nothing of its difficulties. Chief of the Imperial General Staff Alan Brooke wrote in his diary, “I am very uneasy about the whole operation. No wonder Allied commanders were worried. Meanwhile, Hitler’s new weapons-rockets, jet aircraft and advances in submarine warfare-would have made the Allies’ task even harder. Or Stalin could have beat the Nazis-and extended the Soviet Union’s Communist tyranny all the way to Western Europe, winning the Cold War before it even started. Joseph Stalin may have made peace with Adolf Hitler. Winston Churchill could have been pushed out of office. If D-Day failed, the Allies would be unable to launch another attack for at least a year. In his book Band of Brothers, Steven Ambrose wrote, “The only consolation the airborne commanders could find in this mess was that by tradition a bad dress rehearsal leads to a great opening night.” Five hundred of the paratroopers suffered broken bones, sprains and other injuries. Twenty-eight planes returned to base without having dropped off anyone. They scattered, and many couldn’t find the drop zone.
The transport planes ran into a German bombing raid. The dress rehearsal for the paratroopers who would land the night before D-Day ended with a lot of pilots getting lost. Operation Eagle was less of a debacle, but that’s not saying much. Authorities were so concerned about its effect on morale that they covered up the incident-and it remained secret for 40 years. German torpedo boats found their way in among the land craft and attacked. Operation Tiger, in April 1944, was a large-scale dress rehearsal held on the beaches of Dover. The rehearsals for D-Day were less than promising. They had mined the beaches and coastal waters and filled the fields with pikes to thwart glider attacks. They had used 18 million tons of concrete to build bunkers and other fortifications. And other Allied landings during World War ii had failed.įor two years, 2 million slave laborers had worked under the Nazis to fortify the French coast against exactly this type of assault. It was the biggest, most ambitious amphibious landing in history. D-Day could have been the disaster that lost the Allies the war.
0 kommentar(er)
