Kemper Lectures
CHURCHILL AND EUROPE IN 1944
Sir William Deakin, D.S.O. , March 18, 1984
The military liquidation of Germany would, in a matter of months, leave a central
desert and empty space. A revolutionary adjustment of power in Europe would
follow, and its form moulded by the relative interests and strengths of the United
States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union.
Sir William Deakin, D.S.O. , March 18, 1984
The culminating military strategy of the Grand Alliance was, in reality, worked-out on two isolated fronts: in the West and the East. At no point was there a combined great operation accepted by the three Great Powers. Indeed, two separate wars were being fought against Germany: the only common denominators being her total destruction.
The last stages of the conduct of the war in the West by the United States and Great Britain brought into the open, frustrating strategic controversies which have since bedevilled historians and led to the emergence – and at times demolition – of myths and legends on both sides.
The outcome was inevitably a compromise. The year 1944 led to strains in the ‘special relationship’ between us.
The debate over the launching of ‘Overlord’ and the opening of the Second Front is both too complex and familiar for me to venture into this well-trampled arena.
My own study of the British records; of many talks with Churchill himself and British leaders of the day, lead me to what he would call certain ‘recorded truths.’
To Churchill, the strategic concept of the Second Front was never in doubt, and would be the decisive Anglo-American operation in the European War – an irreversible and unrepeatable assault on Germany from the West – which could only be carried out once, and with an absolute margin of safety.