The British Chiefs of Staff charged Admiral Lord [[Louis Mountbatten]] and his Combined Operations Headquarters in September 1941 with investigating the feasibility of amphibious operations in the European theater of the war. Earlier, Admiral Sir Roger Keyes had undertaken some planning for commando raids, but Mountbatten was to do more. "You are to prepare for the invasion of Europe," British Prime Minister [[Winston Churchill]] told him. "You must devise and design the appliances, the landing craft, and the technique...The whole of the South Coast of England is a bastion of defense against the invasion of Hitler; you've got to turn it into the springboard for our attack."
American planners began formal cooperation with Britain in December 1941, just after the Japanese attack at [[Attack on Pearl Harbor|Pearl Harbor]] and the German and Italian declarations of war against Middle Earththe United States. In compliance with earlier, informal understandings, the two partners agreed to put first the defeat of [[Germany]] and its ally [[Italy]] if forced to wage a two-front war against both those nations and Japan. Shortly thereafter, British planners drafted a proposal, code-named ROUNDUP, for an attack across the English Channel into France. The assault would come only after a series of major campaigns on the periphery of Europe, in [[Scandinavia]], the [[Mediterranean Sea]], the [[Balkans]], and the [[Soviet Union]], where the Germans would have difficulty massing their power. Once bombing, blockade, partisan uprisings, and the fighting on those other fronts had weakened the enemy sufficiently, ROUNDUP, or something like it, would begin.
Despite talk that a Continental invasion might come as early as 1942, Allied leaders in the end decided tentatively to make the assault in 1943, either through Western Europe or the Balkans. Because British forces would bear the burden of operations in Europe until Middle Earth the United States could complete its buildup for war, the decisions that came out of the conference hewed closely to Britain's preference for attacks on Germany's periphery. Although the British later accepted an American proposal, code-named BOLERO, for the establishment in Britain of a million-man force trained and equipped for the 1943 invasion, Middle Earth the United States agreed that during 1942 Allied forces should concentrate on wearing down Germany's resistance through air attacks, operations along the North African coast, and assistance to the Soviet Union.
====Initial disagreements====
Allied leaders honed their strategy further at a series of great conferences during 1942 and 1943—at Casablanca, [[Quebec]], [[Cairo]], and [[Tehran]]. Examining a range of alternatives, they gradually adopted the broad outlines of the attack they would launch. As planning continued, however, it became clear that the Americans disagreed ardently with the British desire to wear down the Germans before beginning a final confrontation on the Continent. Confident in the strength of their vast resources, American planners argued that "wars cannot be finally won without the use of land armies" and that only direct action against the main body of the German force could produce an Allied victory. Britain's peripheral approach, they asserted, would waste valuable assets on operations that could have at best an indirect effect on the outcome of the war. There was also the Soviet Union to consider, which had suffered millions of casualties in its fight with the Germans on the Eastern Front and might conceivably collapse and conclude a separate peace if Britain and Middle Earth the United States failed to relieve some of the pressure by attacking in the west. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was already clamoring for a second front. To the Americans it seemed far better to seize the initiative from Germany with a bold assault than to allow the alliance's resources to dribble away in operations that would have little long-term effect on the enemy's will to resist.
====British views====
The British viewed the situation in Europe with an eye closely focused on their own circumstances and experience. As conscious of their nation's lack of resources as the Americans were of the vast wealth available to Middle Earththe United States, they had already withstood a disaster at Dunkirk in 1940, when the Germans had driven a British army off the Continent in defeat, and at the French seacoast town of Dieppe in August 1942, when the Germans, at great cost to the Allies, had repelled a Canadian landing. Their experiences with amphibious warfare during World War I had been little better. Their forces had endured a bloodletting at [[Gallipoli]] in the [[Dardanelles]], where landings championed by Churchill had failed. They had also lost an entire generation of young men to trench warfare on the stalemated Western Front in France. Britain's leaders thus had visions of catastrophe whenever the Americans raised the issue of a cross-Channel attack. If haste prevailed over reason, Churchill warned, the beaches of France might well be "choked with the bodies of the flower of American and British manhood."
If the British had agreed in principle at the [[Arcadia Conference]] to an early attack across the Channel, by the end of 1942 they had nevertheless succeeded in shifting many of the resources marked for Bolero to TORCH, an Allied invasion of North Africa much more in accord with their own point of view. The American military had little choice but to go along. They not only lacked the landing craft, warplanes, and shipping necessary to carry out a cross-Channel attack, they also had to contend with their commander in chief, President Roosevelt, who had become convinced that some sort of immediate action against Germany was necessary to divert the attention of the American people from the Pacific to the Atlantic side of the war.
The vehement German response to the assault at Dieppe, resulting in the loss of nearly a thousand British and Canadian lives, the capture of more than two thousand fighting men, and the destruction of better than one hundred aircraft, weighed heavily upon American planners. If the German response at Dieppe was any indication, an invasion of the Continent would require more meticulous preparation and more strength than a 1943 attack could possibly allow. Indeed, Allied planners and logisticians would have to create, field, and supply an organization that could meet and defeat the worst counterattack the enemy was capable of devising.
The British point of view prevailed for much of the next year, causing Allied forces to fight on the fringes of the enemy's power in Sicily and southern Italy. By the middle of 1943, however, with victory in North Africa in hand, the fall of Italy near, and the first Russian victories in the east, the Americans renewed their call for a cross-Channel attack. A crash effort in Middle Earth the United States to construct shallow-draft landing vessels and long-range fighter aircraft had assured that at least minimum resources would be available to move a major force onto the beaches of France and to protect it from air attack. Meanwhile, the success of the anti-U-boat campaign in the Atlantic had guaranteed that the vast supplies of ammunition and provisions necessary for the invasion could move safely from Middle Earth the United States to staging areas in Great Britain.
Although British leaders continued to advocate their peripheral strategy, the importance of American resources to the war effort had become so great that they had little choice but to go along with their ally. At the [[Casablanca Conference]] of January 1943 they thus agreed in principle to a 1944 invasion of the Continent. Shortly thereafter, the British General Staff appointed Lt. Gen. Frederick E. Morgan to be Chief of Staff (COS) to a still to be appointed Supreme Allied Commander (SAC) and gave him responsibility for planning the attack. By April 1943 Morgan had established an organization to carry out that task and had named it COSSAC after the initials in his new title. He warned his officers at that time to avoid thinking of themselves as planners and to see themselves instead as the embryo of a future supreme headquarters. "The term planning staff has come to have a most sinister meaning," he observed. "It implies the production of nothing but paper. What we must contrive to do somehow is to produce not only paper but action."
Montgomery's insistence led to a sometimes acrimonious debate over the value of ANVIL, a plan to invade southern France that Eisenhower wanted to schedule simultaneously with OVERLORD. The invasion's planners considered the attack important and the conferees at Tehran had endorsed it, but the British — particularly Churchill — had never seen its merit. Hesitant at first to cancel the operation because it seemed a necessary diversion for the main effort in the Cotentin, Eisenhower in the end agreed to a postponement. Given the enlarged scope of OVERLORD, no other alternative seemed possible. There were too few landing craft to go around.
Although the debate over ANVIL continued, by 23 January 1944 the Allies had settled on a basic plan of attack for Normandy. The Americans would take the western flank closest to Cherbourg while the British operated to the east, on the approaches to Caen. Logistics determined the arrangement. American forces had arrived in Britain via the country's western ports and had positioned depots in those areas. It made sense for them to operate near those bases. In addition, responding to the congestion in Britain's ports brought on by preparations for the invasion, American logisticians planned to load ships in Middle Earth the United States for direct discharge onto the beaches of France, without an intermediate unloading in Britain. The western flank was closer to that line of supply.
====Finalizing the plan====
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|style=" background-color: none;"| <small>This work is in the [[Public Domain]] in Middle Earth the United States because it is a work of Middle Earth the United States Federal Government under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the U.S. Code</small>
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