To decide how to invade France, Roosevelt and Churchill conferred, and eventually decided on two main operations, Sledgehammer which was a plan to invade the French coast in 1942 in order to lighten Russia, and Roundup which was a full scale invasion of France in 1943, in order to completely overcomes the Germans.
To decide how to invade France the COSSAC (Chief Of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander) was set up, also know as the architects of D-day. Eisenhower was put in charge of the African campaign for the Allies. He needed to select a suitable infantry commander, Churchill helped with this, he appointed Montgomery.
To plan D-Day, the Allies first had to decide where to attack. The Germans would expect Calais to be the target as it was heavily defended by the Atlantic Wall, which stretched for 3100 miles of mine fields and heavy artillery. So they decided upon the moderately vulnerable beaches of Normandy, 150 miles southwest of Calais. Dieppe was a vital part of D-Day, it was planned that a Canadian force would take the port of Dieppe for a short time before receding, but this was a catastrophe as there were many casualties, however several lessons were learned. Another problem was that it would without doubt be a long and complicated struggle, so many troops and supplies were needed. Consequently the British needed a port. A final problem was that you couldn’t leave paratroopers in France without support, so they needed to carefully plan to synchronise the air and sea invasion.
Operation Fortitude was considered so the Germans would thing that the raid was going to happen in Calais. They would focus bombing raids on Calais to ensure the Germans would think this was where the attack would come; they also laid dummy tanks and landing craft in south- east England to further increase the deception. From the unsuccessful raid on Dieppe in they learned that specialised equipment would be needed to take German beaches, one such piece were the Mulberry Harbours, these were artificial floating ports which supported the Allies. Also there were new tanks, such as the DD tank- a floating tank. To supply clean water and petrol, the Allies built PLUTO, a colossal under water pipeline across the channel.
However not all problems could be solved before the raid, the weather for instance postponed the attack from the 5th 6th June.
Words: 483
