Neptune: The Allied Invasion Of Europe And The D-Day Landings - Plot & Excerpts
At that rate, he noted, there would be some 135,000 American soldiers—about nine divisions—in England by August 1943, in position for a swift cross-Channel assault in case of a German collapse. Of course, Germany did not collapse that summer, nor did the Americans manage to ship twelve thousand GIs a month to England. Instead, the number averaged only a fraction of Brooke’s proposed goal—in March, for example, only twelve hundred GIs arrived. As a result, by mid-May, when the Trident conferees agreed to invade France a year hence, while there were more than a hundred thousand U.S. support personnel on or near the airfields in East Anglia, there were fewer than twenty thousand American combat troops in England—barely one division. Clearly, if the Allies were serious about a cross-Channel invasion in less than twelve months, the movement of American troops to England would have to increase dramatically. And it did. Once Neptune-Overlord was approved at Trident and ratified at Quebec, the transatlantic trickle of American soldiers turned into a flood.
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