WASHINGTON -- Had it not been for one hard-headed American general, Wednesday's events commemorating the 40th anniversary of D-Day might not be held on the Normandy coast of France -- or any coast of France. The site might be some beach on the Balkan Peninsula.
For it was Gen. George C. Marshall, a career soldier who later served as secretary of defense and state, who insisted the Allies drive into Nazi Germany with a massive smash across the English Channel, across France, and across the Rhine River.
No long way around through Southeastern Europe; no long-term strangulation of the Third Reich by strategic bombing; no long wait for a revolt by the German people.
Marshall, U.S. chief of staff throughout World War II, convinced President Franklin Roosevelt that a cross-Channel invasion was the shortest and cheapest route because it was the most direct route -- a straight stab for the jugular.
The two persuaded Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his British military chiefs to drop their search for an alternative to 'Overlord,' the frontal assault against Hitler's Atlantic Wall that some considered an intolerable gamble.
And so it was that American, British and Canadian troops fought their way ashore on the Normandy beaches June 6, 1944, across France and Belgium and into Germany, ending the war in Europe 11 months later.
And so it is that June 6, 1984, the 40th anniversary of D-Day is being commemorated on the northern coast of France, and not on some Balkan coast along the Adriatic or Aegean seas.
Research by Forrest C. Pogue, Marshall's biographer and a U.S. Army combat historian in World War II, indicates that had it not been for Marshall, the Western Allies might have taken a southern route through the Balkans -- 'the soft underbelly of Europe' -- and thus prolonged the war.
At meetings with Roosevelt and his military leaders, Churchill and Gen. Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the British Imperial General Staff, spoke of landing troops in the Eastern Mediterranean, then driving north into Germany via Hungary, Austria and Czechoslovakia.
But Marshall, said Pogue, rejected all alternatives to a cross-Channel attack and perservered at every opportunity for a straightforward assault on the French coast by an Allied army based in England.
Pogue, who landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day plus 2 and wrote the three-volume biography of Marshall, is the recognized authority on the general's life as soldier and statesman.
Still an active writer, Pogue, 71, frequently returns to the old European battlegrounds to tramp the invasion beaches -- Omaha, Utah, Gold, Juno and Sword. He arranged to return again for the 40th anniversary.
'It was Marshall who, day in and day out, kept hammering away at the cross-Channel concept,' Pogue said in an interview at his office at the Smithsonian Institution, where he is director of the Eisenhower Institute of Historical Research. 'He knew that was the quickest way to get at the main German power.'
The casualty-conscious British were wary of invading across the Channel. Every able-bodied Englishman was involved in the war effort. There was no reserve manpower pool such as existed in the United States. Casualties could not be replaced.
When the second world war began, Britons still were recovering from the first, in which a generation of English manhood was mangled in prolonged trench warfare. They were understandably circumspect about gambling thousands of lives in a frontal assault against strongly fortified beaches defended by their old North African Nemesis, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.
Churchill feared the English Channel would be turned into 'a river of blood.'
'The British had an argument' said Pogue, 'a good argument from their standpoint -- that they had to conserve manpower, and the best way to conserve it was to fight peripheral battles ... not to throw them into a cross-Channel attack.'
With that in mind, said Pogue, Churchill and his military chiefs considered not only a smaller operation in the Eastern Mediterranean, but also wearing down Germany by attrition -- bombing it to bits with the hope the German people would end the war themselves by revolting against Hitler.
Marshall had first sought to cross the Channel with a small force in 1942 but could not, for lack of men and equipment. Instead, the Western Allies undertook a lesser challenge and invaded North Africa in 1942.
Marshall hoped for a cross-Channel invasion again in 1943, but Washington and London decided to invade Sicily and Italy instead. Marshall supported these Mediterranean operations with reluctance because he feared such preliminaries would delay the main event.
The invasions of North Africa, Sicily and Italy were nurtured by the British and the Mediterranean operations would not have ended there, said Pogue, if Churchill had had his way.
The prime minister stubbornly plugged away with proposals for more troop landings in the Mediterranean theater. 'Some of our own Americans became sold on this proposition in the late part of '43 and early '44,' Pogue recalled.
Even Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, Allied commander in the Mediterranean at the time, became sympathetic to the Churchillian doctrine, 'but Ike's attitude changed enormously once he was named to command Overlord,' Pogue said.
Marshall and his people in the War Department, including Secretary Henry Stimson, a strong backer of a cross-Channel attack, feared Churchill would undermine them at the White House, Pogue said.
'They were never sure that Roosevelt would not, in a private conference with Churchill, give away part of what they had won.
'The British didn't play a very square game with Marshall,' said Pogue, who wrote the three-volume Marshall biography in his role as head of the George C. Marshall Research Library.
'The British chiefs may have bought the concept of a cross-Channel invasion,' Pogue said, 'but Churchill didn't.'
Marshall 'kept feeling that Churchill was just putting him off, telling Marshall, 'Yes, I certainly agree to that (Overlord), but right now let's just do this.'
Churchill also toyed with the notion of invading Norway, discussing it with his military chiefs up until the Quebec conference in August 1943. 'Make me a nice plan for Norway,' Pogue quoted Churchill as telling them at one point.
As the November 1943 Cairo conference approached, Pogue said, 'Marshall could see what was coming up, that Churchill was going to continue to say: 'The troops are down here in the Mediterranean. Let's push on to the next point -- to the Eastern Mediterranean.'
'That's when Marshall called a halt. Absolutely.'
Marshall's 'halt' was prompted by Churchill's Cairo proposal that the Allies invade the Greek island of Rhodes, in the Eastern Mediterranean at the foot of Turkey, presumably as a steppingstone toward a southern entry into Europe.
'I have a tape of my interview with Marshall where he recalls what he and Churchill said to each other,' Pogue said, quoting Marshall:
'I remember Churchill standing up with his hands on his lapels, and he says, 'Muskets must flame.' All kinds of oratory like that. I just said to him, 'You can do whatever you like with the British, but not one American soldier is going to die on that goddamn beach.'
And thus ended any thought of the Allies invading Rhodes.
Marshall had counted on commanding Overlord, but at the last minute Roosevelt decided that he could not do without Marshall in Washington as chief of staff, so Eisenhower was named supreme commander of allied powers in Europe.
In the aftermath of the war, after the Soviet Union had made communist satellites out of the Eastern European nations occupied by the Red Army, there was talk about Churchill's wisdom in proposing an invasion through Southern Europe.
Such an enterprise, it was said, would have headed off the Russians, and those Eastern European nations would have been occupied by the Western Allies.
But the long-range political aspects of an Eastern Mediterranean invasion 'came late in Churchill's thinking,' said Pogue. 'That argument wasn't used until October of '44' -- four months after D-Day.
As for the political effects of a main thrust through the Balkans, Pogue said, 'I think there is just one question you need to ask about that: If we had put all our force down in the Balkans ... where is the part of Germany through which you can advance most rapidly if you're the Russians?
'It's the north German plain.
'If you've got your main force in the Balkans instead of Normandy ... who is going to be on the Channel while you are still trying to get across the Alps?'
No matter. Pogue believes Churchill's main consideration was to minimize casualties, not to deflect the Russians.
As it turned out, casualties in the Normandy invasion were fewer than anticipated. And the biggest slaughter occurred at Omaha Beach, where the Americans -- not the British -- just barely made it ashore under the fiercest German defense.
