D-Day contingency plans

What if D-Day had been a failure ? What where the plans next ?

I suppose that reserves and evacuated forces would have been sent to the South of France to open the Second Front where and wherever possible. Or would the allies have waited until there was another opportunity to land on the Channel coast ?

As far as I know, there were none. Overlord just had to succeed. In Eisenhowers works, the Allied were putting 'the whole works on one number.'

The experience in Dieppe had at least demonstrated what the consequences of a failed invasion would be. The troops on the beaches were fighting with their back to the sea; in a failure most of these men would have been lost, captured if not killed, together with much of the specialised equipment for the landing. Replacing men and materiel, and devising a new plan for another landing site (there were 16,000 people employed merely in planning Overlord) would have resulted in a postponement to (at least) the spring of 1945.

A year's delay would have been a potential disaster, or at least was preceived as such. The Allied staffs were deeply worried about what could happen in that year; from the introduction of the expected V-weapons by the Germans, and perhaps even nuclear weapons, to the possibility of a separate peace between Hitler and Stalin.

The invasion in Southern France was not, and could not be, more than a subsidiary effort. Apart from the greater distance to Germany, the supply lines were much longer. It is hard to find a real purpose for Anvil/Dragoon, except keeping the British out of the Eastern Mediterranean by putting the strategic emphasis in the West. In case Overlord failed, the landing in the South would probably have been

The coast of Provence is 565 km from the German border (the Rhine above Strasbourg).

The coast of Normandy is 520 km from the German border (the Saarbrucken region).

The rail lines from southeastern France run directly north to the late-1944 combat zone in Alsace and Lorraine, along the Rhone River.

The rail lines from Normandy and Brittany don't run directly east. Routing across those lines to get supplies from the beachheads and early-capture to the front was circuitous.

Furthermore, the rail lines in the west were heavliy bombed during the Normandy campoign, whereas the Rhone River lines were not attacked.

1) The capture of Marseille, one of the largest ports in Europe. Marseille landed 1/3 of Allied suppplies in later 1944 and 1945.

2) Covering the right flank of OVERLORD's drive on Germany. As Eisenhower explained in _Crusade in Europe_, if the OVERLORD force had to defend an extended right flank, all the way to Germany, so much of their strength would be diverted to this that the advance would be slowed to crawl.

on 5 Apr 2004 16:13:21 GMT,

I suspect that Berlin would have recieved the first nuclear weapon used in anger, not Hiroshima.

True, but nobody was much interested in Southern Germany. The real targets were in Northern Germany, the center of the industry and the political power. The proposed line of advance to get there was the traditional one, through the Low Countries and Northern France.

Defend against what? The Anvil forces were simply too far away to defend the right flank of the troops in Normandy. If the idea was to bind the German 19th Army in the South, this consisted of one armoured division and seven divisions of second-rate (and that is generous) infantry. It was incapable of any offensive action. Even Hitler admitted that, confronted with the invasion, its only option was to head for the German border (or in the case of one corps, Italy) as fast as confiscated bicycles could carry them. That many of them actually managed to reach the German lines in the North was almost entirely due to the inexperience of the American commanders, who were perhaps a bit disorganised by the speed of their advance.

There was a contingency plan in the event that one or more of the beach landings had failed. It is well known that Patton was being used to accomplish two missions. One mission was to command the FUSAG (First United States Army Group) deception force to tie down German forces in the Pas de Calais. The second mission was to command the U.S. Third Army in a planned breakthrough and and maneuver from the Normandy invasion lodgement area. It is not so well known that Patton was assigned a third mission to accomplish. In the event that one or more of the OPERATION OVERLORD invasion beachheads proved to be a failure, the OPERATION SWORDHILT contingency plan held Patton's U.S. Third Army in reserve to reinforce the OPERATION OVERLORD invasion beachheads.

Partly it would have depended on how many Allied landing craft (especially LCTs and LSTs) were lost during the landings. They were needed to bring tanks and other vehicles ashore, and shortages of LSTs (Landing Ship, Tanks) in particular had delayed D-Day while more were built/sourced. So if too many were destroyed, possibly the Allies couldn't have made a major landing for months.

It would also have depended on how many troops had been landed before being repulsed. Britain didn't have many divisions left, so if a large part of the British forces had been landed on D-Day and subsequent days, and were then lost, the British might have been hard-pressed to make another major landing - so a greater burden would have fallen on the Americans. This would have been a political as much as a military issue - would the US have reversed policy and decided to defeat Japan first? Who knows...

We know from the historical record that OPERATION SWORDHILT may have been implemented. This operation planned to land Patton's Third Army for the reinforcement of OPERATION OVERLORD using, in addition to the other landing craft, an additional 300 amphtracs which had been rejected by the planners for OPERATION OVERLORD.