forces. Some 4,000 ships and landing vessels transported nearly 176,000 troops
and materiel across the English Channel to breach Hitler’s Atlantic Wall; 600
Allied warships, 2,500 heavy bombers, and 7,000 fighters were in support. By the
conclusion of the first day, five divisions were ashore in addition to three airborne
divisions, which had been dropped further inland; these numbers included the
4th US Infantry Division on Utah Beach, and the 1st US Infantry and 29th US
Infantry Divisions on Omaha Beach, as well as the 82nd and 101st US Airborne
Divisions. Within a month, the total number of troops ashore had grown to one
million, with 150,000 vehicles. 48 The Normandy countryside favoured the de-
fence, however, and the advance only crawled forward, enabling considerable
German formations to reinforce the sector, despite steady Allied air interdiction
along the main routes.
Although Patton was already a controversial figure, his reputation for aggres-
siveness made him the perfect choice to ‘command’ the notional 1st US Army
Group, as part of Operation Fortitude, the deception plan to make the Germans
believe that the invasion of France would occur at Pas de Calais. He was
subsequently put in command of the US 3rd Army, which made a historic
contribution to American operational art with the breakout from Normandy in
August 1944. Typically, infantry units, supported by air bombardment, armour,
and artillery, would achieve a local penetration, which would then be exploited by
armour and other mechanized formations with air elements providing flank
security and forward reconnaissance. The culmination of the breakout was the
encirclement and destruction of the German 7th Army and 5th Panzer Army
(10,000 dead and 50,000 prisoners) as cohesive fighting formations in and
around the Falaise–Argentan gap; this operation, though not a complete success,
opened the way to rapid exploitation and pursuit by several Allied mechanized
formations across northern France. 49
The advance of Allied forces wound down due to the length of their logistical
tails and lines of communication, which had to move from the Cherbourg
Peninsula and north-west coastlines to the borders of north-eastern France.
Several other campaigns followed, notably the Lorraine and Rhine campaigns,
which took American forces into Germany; however, the pattern was generally
the same: an infantry or armour assault and penetration with an abundance of air
power to protect the flanks and disrupt the movements of enemy reinforcements.
In the Pacific, Allied campaign strategy eventually settled on a two-pronged
advance, crossing 14,200 miles of archipelagos and major islands. The series of
island-hopping campaigns carried out by the United States and the other Allied
powers could not have been successful without the cooperation—which was
hardly without friction—that developed between air, naval, and ground forces.
The Japanese could not make up the losses they suffered at Midway, in the
Philippines, Leyte Gulf, and elsewhere, while also prosecuting a vast land war
within China. The US submarine force succeeded in severely constricting the flow
of Japanese shipping: some 300 submarines sank 4,779,902 tons of merchant
shipping as well as 540,192 tons of warships during the war, 54.6 per cent of all
Japanese tonnage. 50 The island-hopping campaigns (1943–5) of General Douglas
American Operational Art, 1917–2008 149