Friend of mine sent me a link this morning to a UK Express interview with Brian Cox, who stars in a new movie about Winston Churchill. The headline was like something right out of American Betrayal:
Churchill did NOT want D-Day ‘His plan would have ended WW2 6 months EARLIER'
However, when I clicked on the Express link, I got this:
Gone.
Fortunately, the story was cached, so I took a series of screen shots to reconstruct it below.
Cox discusses Churchill famed "soft underbelly" strategy to press Nazi Germany through southern Europe rather than, or even in addition to, the invasion of northern France at Normandy. Cox tells a very interesting story about how the movie's military advisor said near the end of filming that when he was Sandhurst, Churchill's strategy was subject to computer modeling. The outcome? The war might have ended six months earlier.
Why would such a story would be pulled offline? Anyone's guess. Mine is that British censors are as keen to preserve the "court history" as American enforcers.
NB: Maybe things in the Academy are worse that I thought, but I believe Churchill's disagreement with FDR and Stalin is still widely noted in American history books. What is little known -- and carefully documented in American Betrayal -- is the support Churchill's general idea had among top US military brass (e.g., Eisenhower, Eaker, Spaatz, Clark) and others, who saw the efficacy of entering, or, rather (in light of the Italian campaign already underway), continuing to enter Europe closer to the German heartland -- and closer also to central and eastern European nations that would otherwise be defenseless against Red Army invasion followed by conquest. (See, for example, "Was the Soft Underbelly Also an Overripe Plum?" here.) American Betrayal also examines the implications of Stalin's insistence on France as focal point of GB and US armies, a strategy that was amplified and, practically, enforced by the aggressively pro-Soviet Harry Hopkins, FDR's top advisor and possible agent of influence.
