The result was a long list of Churchill-produced British blunders and disasters: Antwerp, Gallipoli, Norway, Greece, Dieppe, etc. where land-based forces easily contained amphibious descents on the European mainland. The Churchill-inspired invasion of Italy turned into a mess. The mountainous terrain of Italy, crisscrossed with rivers and streams that inconveniently ran perpendicular to the Allied line of advance, allowed Smiling Albert to hold up substantially larger Allied forces without requiring substantial reinforcement from other German fronts. An Allied invasion of the Balkans would have ended up like Italy except without the advantage of the”advanced” transportation infrastructure of southern Italy.

The only gap in the mounted girded “soft underbelly” of southern Europe was the Rhone valley in southern France. It was here that Operation Dragoon, the only useful Allied operation against southern Europe, took place on August 15, 1944. Even then, Dragoon’s success was partially due to it being a secondary attack in support of the main attack that had taken place two months earlier in Normandy. Perhaps sensing the possibility of its success, Churchill had long opposed Operation Dragoon.

The only place where enough mass could be brought to bear on German arms to amphibiously force Anglo-American arms back onto the North European plain was Northern France with its proximity to the dense transportation and logistics capability of southeastern England a short distance across the Channel. And it was only on the North European plain that some decision in the war could be reached. I’ll take Wedemeyer over Churchill any day when it comes to strategic competence.