The Western consciousness firmly established the belief that only after June 6, 1944, when the Second Front of the Second World War was opened , a decisive turning point occurred and the liberation of Europe from Nazi Germany began. The battle on the Kursk Bulge, the battles near Moscow and near Stalingrad, which really became the turning points in the war, are usually either not mentioned at all, or are considered very briefly. Is the second front an Allied operation that really decided the outcome of the war, or is it just an excuse to lower the role of the Red Army in defeating the enemy?
Preparation for Operation Overlord
When developing the landing plan on the Normandy coast, the allies (USA, Great Britain, France) relied on the fact that the enemy did not know the date and place of the operation. To ensure secrecy, the largest disinformation operation in history was successfully carried out. In the course of it, an imitation of building up the allied military capabilities in the Edinburgh and Pas de Calais region was carried out. The main goal was to distract the German command from the real place of the planned landing on the shores of Normandy.
Choosing the place and date of the operation
The Allied command, carefully studying the entire Atlantic coast, chose where to open the Second Front. Photos that have come down to us from those days cannot convey the full scale of the operation. The landing site was finally determined by the power of the enemy defenses, the distance from the UK and the radius of action of the Allied fighters.
Normandy, Brittany, and the Pas de Calais were best suited for landing. The German command, however, believed that if the Second Front opened, the Allies would choose the Pas de Calais, since the region is closest to Great Britain. The Allies also abandoned Brittany, since this area, although it was relatively close, was less fortified.
As for the day of the operation, the landing had to be carried out at a minimum tide level and immediately after sunrise. Such days were in early May and early June. At first it was planned to carry out a landing in early May, but the date was postponed to June, since a plan for one landing had not yet been prepared. In June, it was possible to open a war on the Second Front on the 5th, 6th or 7th. At first, the Allies decided to start the operation on June 5, but due to a sharp deterioration in weather conditions, the landing was moved to the sixth.
The undeniable superiority of the Allies over the Germans
By the beginning of Operation Overlord, the Allies had at their disposal more than five thousand fighters, almost one and a half thousand bombers, more than two thousand planes, two and a half thousand gliders and more than one and a half thousand heavy bombers. Only five hundred aircraft were concentrated at French airfields near the landing site, of which only one and a half hundred were on alert. The Allies also took care of destroying the fuel for German aviation. So, in 1944, several raids were made on synthetic fuel plants. In the spring of 1944, the superiority of the allied forces turned into complete air supremacy.
Landing in Normandy
The second front is the strategic operation of the allied forces, which began on June 6, 1944 with a landing in Normandy. At night, a parachute landing landed, which occupied a bridge over the Orne River and the city of Saint-Mer-Eglis, and in the morning a sea landing was landed.
Despite careful preparation, the operation did not go according to plan from the very beginning. At one of the landing sites, the Allies suffered heavy losses. As a result, the Allied forces landed more than 150 thousand people in Normandy, eleven and a half thousand support planes, more than two thousand combat aircraft and almost a thousand gliders were involved. The Navy deployed almost seven thousand ships. By June 11, 1944, more than three hundred thousand military and almost fifty-five thousand units of military equipment were already on the shores of Normandy.
Losses during the landing on the shores of Normandy
Human casualties during the landing (dead, wounded, missing and prisoners of war) amounted to about ten thousand people. Wehrmacht losses are difficult to assess. The Third Reich lost about four to nine thousand people. Fifteen to twenty thousand more civilians died during the bombing of the Allied aircraft.
Creating a foothold for further offensive
For six days, the allied forces created a bridgehead for a further breakthrough. Its length was about eighty kilometers, its depth was ten to seventeen kilometers. German troops suffered heavy losses. German intelligence had information about the imminent invasion, but the leadership continued to hold the main forces not on the Second (the Eastern Front was more occupied by the military leaders of the Third Reich) front.
By the end of June, the Allies had already advanced a hundred kilometers along the front and twenty to forty kilometers in depth. Twenty-five German divisions opposed twenty-five German divisions, but already on July 25 the number of allied forces exceeded one and a half million people. The mistake of the German leadership was that even after this the command continued to believe that the landing in Normandy was a sabotage, but in fact the offensive would take place in Pas de Calais.
Operation Cobra: Normandy Breakthrough Plan
The second front is not only landing operations in Normandy, but also the further advance of the allies throughout France, a breakthrough. The second part of the Overlord plan was called Operation Cobra.
The base for the American military contingent before the breakthrough was the area near Saint-Lo - the city that was liberated on July 23. The positions of the Germans were almost completely destroyed by a massive bombardment, the opponents did not manage to close the gap in time, and on July 25, US troops made a breakthrough.
The Germans made attempts to counterattack, but this led only to the Falezsky cauldron and a particularly severe defeat of the troops of Nazi Germany.
Operation completion
Following the Americans, the British military approached the area of active hostilities. Soon, the entire German Normandy defense system collapsed. The defeat of the troops of war-losing Nazi Germany was only a matter of time. In late August, the Allies forced the Seine and liberated Paris. On this, the opening of the Second World Front was completed.
Consequences of the opening of the Western Front in Normandy
The successful offensive of the Allied forces in Normandy caused the collapse of the entire Western Front of Nazi Germany. The new line was established by the Germans only in September 1944 on the western border of the Third Reich. The allies tried to break the Siegfried line to avoid problems with the supply of troops and get to the industrial areas of Germany, and then end the war by Christmas, but the plan failed.
In the fall of 1944, the troops of the United States, Great Britain and France came close to the German border from the west, in some places they even managed to break through it. The Wehrmacht lost almost all of its positions in Western Europe. The offensive was temporarily suspended due to supply problems, but by the beginning of winter the Allied forces continued to advance.
Why did the Second Front open only in 1944?
The consequences of Operation Overlord are clear, but why did they decide to conduct its allied forces only when it was already clear that Germany was losing? In the summer of 1944, the question of the victory of the USSR over Nazi Germany was only a matter of time. If the USA, France and Great Britain had not even opened the Western Front at all, the USSR would have won anyway, but perhaps in a year and a half.
The second front is precisely the event to which the Western world gives a decisive role in the victory over Nazi Germany. However, the Western Front, which was so necessary for the USSR, the Allied forces were in no hurry to open. The Soviet military leadership has repeatedly argued that if the landing in Normandy had been carried out earlier, many victims on the Soviet-German front could have been avoided. Reproaches sounded in Soviet times, they sound now.
The following most popular versions of Allied Delay are usually distinguished:
- Unreadiness to conduct military operations. The condition of the armies of Great Britain and the USA at the beginning of the war was deplorable. For a couple of years of hostilities on the Soviet-German front, the Allies not only significantly strengthened their positions, but also waited until most of the German forces moved east.
- The fight for the Suez Canal. Priority for the UK remained the Middle East. By the spring of the forty-first, food was no longer available on the island, so all efforts were devoted to maintaining ties with India and the Middle East, which would provide Britain with necessary goods instead of Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway.
- Disagreement of the Allies. Great Britain and the USA solved only personal tasks in geopolitics, but even greater contradictions became apparent between France and Great Britain. Churchill then proposed to the government of the Third Republic a project involving an actual merger of countries (besides obviously not to please France), then initiated Operation Catapult, which involved the capture of the entire French fleet by Great Britain.
- Threat from Japan. The attack on Pearl Harbor made the United States allies of the Soviet Union and pushed back the opening of the Western Front. The United States then concentrated all its forces on the war with Japan, deploying military operations in the Pacific Ocean.
- Personal goals of the leadership of the allied forces. Almost all Soviet historians agreed that Great Britain, the United States of America and France deliberately delayed the date of the landing in Normandy. The Allies were interested both in weakening the Third Reich and in weakening the Soviet Union.
Although the Allied forces were able to liberate France and Belgium on their own, and later occupy part of Germany, the war on the Second Front in the defeat of the Third Reich did not become as significant as the actions of the Red Army.