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D-Day

In midsummer 1943, a year before the Anglo-American invasion of Normandy, Adolf Hitler's Wehrmacht, still occupied all the territory it had gained in the blitzkrieg campaigns of 1939-41 and most of its Russian conquests of 1941-42. Germany also retained a foothold on the coast of North Africa, acquired when Germany assisted Italy in 1941. The Russian counteroffensives at Stalingrad and Kursk pushed back the perimeter of Hitler's Europe in the east. Yet, Hitler and his allies still controlled the whole of mainland Europe, except for neutral Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and Sweden. The Nazi war economy was eclipsed by the war economy of America but was still larger then Britain and the Soviet Union, except in key areas of tank and aircraft production. Hitler could count on prolonging his military dominance for years to come in Europe unless the Allies intervened with the commitment of a large American army. Since 1942, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had been pressing British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to mount a "second front" in the west. America's army was still forming, while landing craft necessary to bring such an army across the English Channel had not yet been developed. Britain had, nevertheless, begun to prepare plans for a return to the continental mainland soon after their retreat from Dunkirk, France, in 1940. Immediately after Hitler declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941, Germany had started to frame their own timetable. Less inhibited than the British by perceived technical difficulties, they pressed from the start for an early invasion, desirably in 1943, perhaps even in 1942. "To that end George C. Marshall, Roosevelt's chief of staff, appointed a protégé, Dwight D. Eisenhower, to the U.S. Army's war plans division in December 1941 and commissioned him to design an operational scheme for Allied victory"(World War II). Convincing himself swiftly taking care of the Germans first was...