http://churchillfilm.com/
Will be interesting how they handle his distrust of the invasion.
His own books give the impression of his early support, but up until it's success he feared a bloodbath.
Great cast - looks amazing.
Roger Sterling as Eisenhower ???
I like that - not sure why though.
Doesn't really work for me.
Once Churchill was on board with D-Day, he was all in. He may have feared a bloodbath (a lot people in the Allied command did), but Overlord had his full support.
You mean total destruction of the landing force?
He supported it, but he had nightmares of the channel swamped with dead bodies.
Considering how bad the Dieppe raid went back in 1942, when we first tried to open a second front to relieve pressure on Stalin, he did have precedent for that fear. Churchill's Anzio plan hadn't run as well as he wanted either, and that was nowhere near as defended.
(The Dieppe operation, to seize a port as an invasion beachhead, doesn't get a lot of press, for obvious reasons. ;) But Germans defending the Atlantic Wall thought or hoped the next invasion would be like Dieppe: they could crush it early, and then concentrate on defending the Reich against Stalin's advances.)
Dieppe was a raid for intel. There was no intention of taking and holding the port. There would not have been an invasion if the raid had gone well....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieppe_Raid#Background
QuoteThanks to intelligence provided by Ultra, the British knew that if any Allied force attempted to seize a port in France, the Germans would assume it to be the beginning of an invasion and that the Luftwaffe was to mount an all-out effort against the Allied forces in the port, whenever it might be. Armed with this knowledge, Fighter Command pressed very strongly in the spring and summer of 1942 for a raid to temporarily seize a French port in order to provoke the Luftwaffe into committing most of its fighters in France to a battle along the French coast that would favour the RAF. It was largely because of pressure from the RAF to fight the "greatest air battle" over the French coast that Operation Rutter/Jubilee went ahead.
(https://www.grogheads.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fmemecrunch.com%2Fmeme%2F1EGIT%2Fnot-a-great-plan%2Fimage.png%3Fw%3D500%26amp%3Bc%3D1&hash=d1eadb8d638f283adbf47391d2e38f08225d8ba9)
Yeahhhh, you send a platoon of the SAS to raid for intel: they ninja their way into the area, secure the paperwork and take some photos and maybe snag a few high-value targets for interrogation later, and then exfiltrate through wormholes torn in reality by the density of their balls. With a new Enigma machine if they can get it.
You don't send 6000 infantry with support including nearly 60 tanks to raid a port for intel, unless the intel you're looking for is, "Will the Germans allow us to land twelve divisions of troops in this port? Yes, we think the answer is yes." ;)
Granted, the twelve divisions, while available, weren't mobilized to land upon success, and the final plan on the ground seems to have been to destroy port and coastal facilities (and pick up some intel of course in the process because why not go after the new Enigma machine if we can get it) -- which even if it had succeeded would have been a stupid way to achieve the strategic/political objective of showing resolve to open a western front. "We resolve to capture a port to open a western front! By destroying and running away from this port we captured! BEHOLD OUR RESOLVE!" ^-^
The RAF had the better plan to use the raid as an excuse to try trolling the Luftwaffe into a decisive battle. But it was more like, if we aren't really going to try invading now, and aren't really going to support this as an invasion, we might as well accomplish something useful. (The Luftwaffe didn't bite.)
I can sympathize with the need to avoid another Dunkirk. But what they got was a Dieppe. :(
Agreed... but Dieppe was not an attempt to open of a second front. It was about intel in beach landings, port seizure, logistics, German resolve etc. But still just a raid.
The biggest piece of intel they were gathering was whether or not it was feasible to take a defended port by seaborne assault. The answer was a resounding 'No' and informed the decision making for D-Day.
^^ Also Torch, less than 3 months later.
Canadian historian David O'Keefe was able to access recently unclassified documents about a decade ago and, through a lot of research and digging, that the real purpose behind the mass raid on Dieppe was to act as cover for a small snatch team of commandos who were there to steal a new, 4 rotor version of the Enigma code machine. Bletchley Park was once again in the dark as far as U-Boat traffic decryption due to the German's switch from the old 3-rotor machines to the 4-rotor ones and high command was very concerned that the allied invasion forces planned for Sicily would be sitting ducks for U-Boats. Ian Flemming concocted the plan for Dieppe and even had a specialized shallow water river boat shipped back from S.E. Asia to get the commando team up the estuary and as close to the suspected Naval HQ in Dieppe. The raid was meant to provide enough damage and destruction that the Germans would assume the machine was blown up during the fighting.
http://globalnews.ca/news/274605/breaking-german-codes-real-reason-for-1942-dieppe-raid-historian/ (http://globalnews.ca/news/274605/breaking-german-codes-real-reason-for-1942-dieppe-raid-historian/)
There's an hour long documentary on the subject that runs on the Canadian History channel occasionally. The first 30 minutes are kind of a waste as they go into explaining the basics of what the war situation was in summer of 1942, who Ian Flemming was, what Enigma was, etc but the last half is quite good. They even manage to track down the last surviving member of Nr 30 Assault Unit (the commando team assigned to steal the machine) and get his story.
I think it might be available in the US on Amazon Prime.
https://vimeo.com/64112772 (https://vimeo.com/64112772)