(August 31, 2017 at 5:16 pm)CatholicDefender Wrote: If you ask me Churchill was kind of a retard.
Did he really believe that Yugoslavia and Italy were the "soft underbelly" of Europe?
It is probably the most inhospitable areas of Europe to stage a landing operation.
Everyone likes to paint the Americans as stupid arrogant cowboys, but if we actually tried to land in Europe earlier (say operation hammer happened in 1943) we could have opened up a more meaningful front for the Russians and made rapid progress.
Italy was practically like watching paint dry and we technically didn't even liberate the whole country before the war ended. Ever wonder why there was no Saving Private Ryan about the Italy campaign? It was a massive drudge....thats why!
Churchill can't have been serious about Yugoslavia... it was like the Afghanistan of Europe in terms of wild militant groups.
Churchill was not a retard for wanting to avoid a real invasion of Western Europe. Churchill may not admit it, but both churchill and Great Britain suffer a serious inferiority complex in assessing the fighting power of allied armies vs those of the German army. Churchill and Britain were mindful that up to that time, whenever the odds were even, the German army seldomly failed to pull off brilliant and overwhelming victories. The only time the British had won were with overwhelming numerical odds in British favor. In any amphibious invasion. The overwhelming numerical superiority were likely to be on the German side. The invasion looked like a spectacularly risky gamble.
Britain, like Germany, was suffering an acute shortage of manpower. A land war eats manpower like nothing else. Historically, Britain only managed to field an army on D-day by rethlessly stripping the Royal Navy. If the normandie invasion failed, the Americans can wait a year, rally another army, try again, and again, until it had ground the Germans down. But if the british lost the army sent into normandie, Britain could never rally another. Furthermore the Royal Navy is also a spent force. Yes, the ships are still there, but there are no manpower to,crew them. So Britain is effectively out of that, with very little weight it can throw into the fight and assure it has a chair at the table when great,powers decide the future of Europe after the war.
This is why Churchill was eager to avoid committing Britain to an stand-up fight against the main body of the German army in France. Instead, Churchill preferred to,commit Britain to a series of technical operations in a subsidiary theater, like the Mediterranean, where material, which Britain still had in abundance, counted for more, and manpower counted for less.
