Operation Overlord and Its Planning

The Allied planners responsible for planning Operation Overlord were in a very strong position of knowing that they would be able to get all the military, naval and aircraft resources or material that they requested. Once the Allies had won the Battle of the Atlantic, their planners were assured of military and aerial superiority over the German forces that were defending the coast of France. Without the U-boats being able to sink the transport ships that brought the men and equipment from the United States and Canada to Britain, all the Germans could do was wait for the invasion to be launched.

Despite the rise in the production of German military aircraft, there were still not enough squadrons to defend Germany from Allied bombing raids and to attack Allied invasion forces as soon as they landed. The German High Command decided to keep the bulk of their aircraft in Germany and transfer units to France when those units were needed to repel the Allied invasion. In the event the Germans found it very difficult to send reinforcements in to France, no doubt due to the Allied air forces attacking German reinforcements en route to Normandy.

However, from the middle of 1943 the American daylight bombing raids in particular became more effective in destroying Germany’s arms industries, transport systems and its fuel facilities. These raids badly damaged the capabilities that the Germans would need most to repulse Operation Overlord, its tank regiments, and its fighter units. The Allied planners that drew up the plans for Operation Overlord in a sense did not over-estimate the German Air threat, working with the Allied Air forces they came up with effective strategies to nullify it before Operation Overlord got underway.

For the Allied planners that drew up the plans for Operation Overlord there were other factors for delaying the date of the invasion besides the over -estimation of the German Air threat. The Allied planners had to consider that Allied forces were not actually ready to launch the invasion of France before the summer of 1944 anyway. It took more than two years to assemble enough men and equipment to ensure that the Allied forces involved would establish a beachhead in to France that the Germans could not defeat.

To conclude, the over estimation of the German Air threat had little effect upon the over all planning and strategy of Operation Overlord. The Allied planners did not want to leave anything to chance and therefore made sure that the invading Allied forces had enough firepower to overcome the German defences. The German Air threat had been diluted by Germany’s military decline caused by un-replaceable losses on the Eastern Front, the loss of resources from Allied bombing raids and the retreat from occupied territories.

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