s the Americans who were passionately impatient to confront the German army on the continent while the British, right up to the eve of D-Day, were haunted by the deepest misgivings about doing so (20)."
The basic decision to attempt to land an Allied Expeditionary Force in France was not settled until the American-British Trident and Quadrant Conferences in the summer of 1943 and confirmed at the Tehran summit conference with Soviet Premier Josif Stalin in November 1943. In retrospect, as the abortive Canadian raid at Dieppe in August 1942 demonstrated, the Allies were wise to delay the invasion until 1944. Not until the summer of 1943 did Western allied air and sea forces gain the upper hand in the Battle of the Atlantic against the German U-boats, thus permitting the necessary buildup of forces on the British Isles. It took time to expand, arm and train the American Army, which amounted to only 170,000 men in 1940 and reached a level of 7.2 million men (including 2.3 million in the Army Air Force (AAF)) by mid-1943 (Ambrose 40).
In the meantime, the Russians first stalled and then repelled the German onslaught, by holding Moscow in late 1941, defeating the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad in January 1943 and prevailing in the massive armored battle of the Kursk salient in July, 1943. In 1942-1943, the Allies cleared their lines of communication in the Mediterranean through their successful campaigns in North Africa and Sicily, where the Americans obtained invaluable combat experience. The German army suffered more than two million casualties on the Eastern Front. By the spring of 1944, American and British bombing of German cities had begun to take its toll, and the Luftwaffe was forced in part because of the superiority of the P-51, the long-range American fighter, to concentrate much of its remaining fighter strength in Germany.
The next major question facing Allied planners in the fall of 1943 was where. The shortest route to Ge...