Strategic Setting

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 S. 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 Pearl Harbor and the German and Italian declarations of war against the 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, 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 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, 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.