Thursday
Next week I will be releasing D-Day In 60 Minutes which is my first collaboration with writer William Bradle. It is actually the first in a series of books we have decided to write together called, "The 60 Minute History Series".
People are busier today than ever and there is often no time to read a 300 page history book so this series is an answer to that need. The quality will be extremely high and the books accurate and compelling. They will be broad topics but the detail within them will be razor sharp.
There is a large history audience that has somewhat been left behind by outlets such as the History Channel and other networks which craves more and more historical content but in a an hour-long length. Our opinion is if the reader knows going in they can finish the book in an hour they will set aside time for it as they used to do with great History Channel programs. And this has somewhat been proven by other shorter history book series.
Each book in the series will also be produced as an audiobook and I am seeing great growth with the audiobooks I have released so far this year. And the D-Day audiobook should release in July.
Hopefully you will consider picking up D-Day In 60 Minutes which hits bookstores next week.
Below is a preview of what you'll see in an excerpt from Chapter One.
Chapter 1-Why? (D-Day In 60 Minutes)
“I have
therefore decided to strengthen the defenses in the West.” Adolf
Hitler
D-Day is the most crucial battle of World War II for size,
complexity and importance because—
-It was to date the largest amphibious invasion in history,
-Ten Allied nations had troops in the fight,
-160,000 troops landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944: 73,000
Americans, 62,000 British and 21,000 Canadians,
-24,000 American, British and Canadian paratroopers dropped
behind the lines the night before the invasion,
-American soldiers smoked 20 million cigarettes a day.
Eisenhower smoked eighty a day,
-104 American gliders landed behind enemy lines,
-The Allies had 11,590 aircraft in the sky during D-Day. The
Germans had two,
-180,000 German troops were in France with the great majority
in Pas de Calais,
-The Germans thought the Allies would attack Pas de Calais,
21 miles from England. The Allies attacked Normandy, 90 miles away,
-Ships totaled 6,939 ranging in size from the dreadnought
battleship USS Texas 573 long to the
Higgins boat at 36 feet long,
-500 US soldiers died at Omaha Beach, total Allied
fatalities on June 6 were 2,500. 37,000 Allied soldiers would die in the
two-month Normandy campaign to follow,
-C rations came in round cans. The soldiers preferred flat,
rectangular cans but there was not enough machinery in the US to produce flat
cans,
-German E boats killed 700 troops in April 1944 practicing a
landing at Slapton Sands. Hitler noticed the similarity between the Normandy
beaches and Slapton Sands. He ordered more troops to Normandy,
-Hitler thought he could stop the Allies at the beach.
Stalin wasn’t sure the Allies would ever invade.
And then there is geography.
The impact of the Normandy Invasion on the war boils down to
geography. When Allied planning began in 1943, German and Japanese progress had
stalled: the German advance in Russia ground to a halt outside Moscow, German
forces surrendered at Stalingrad and their tank tactics failed at Kursk. The
Marines stopped the Japanese advance and started island hopping in the Pacific
on their way to the islands of Japan. Churchill called the time, “This is not
the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of
the beginning.”
As with Japan in the Pacific, there were a lot of miles
between the Germany’s enemies and the homeland. Allied forces were in Italy,
but Rome is a thousand miles from Berlin. The Russians were advancing but still
1,200 miles from Berlin. More importantly, they were 1,600 miles from the
industrial heart of Germany, the Rhine-Ruhr district. Without the industrial
capacity of the Rhine-Ruhr, the German army and air force would not have the
weapons to fight; the war would be over.
The southeastern tip of England is less than 300 miles from
the Rhine-Ruhr district. The shortest path to victory lay through France and
Hitler knew it.
In a November 1943 Fuhrer Directive he wrote, “but now a
greater danger appears in the West--An Anglo Saxon landing! In the East, the vast extent of the territory
makes it possible for us to lose ground, even on a large scale, without a fatal
blow being dealt to the nervous system of Germany. It is very different in the
West...everything indicates that the enemy will launch an attack against the
Western front...in the spring. I can therefore no longer take responsibility
for further weakening the West...for it is here that the enemy must and will
attack...that the decisive battle against the landing forces will be fought.”
The shift to the
West was, in Hitler’s mind, only temporary. He told his commanders, “The
destruction of the enemy’s landing attempt means more than a purely local
decision on the Western Front. It is the sole decisive factor in the whole
conduct of the war and hence in its final result. Once defeated, the enemy will
never again try to invade...And invasion failure would also deliver a crushing
blow to British and American morale.”
With the defeat
of the invasion, Hitler would turn his forces back on the Russians saying, “So
the whole outcome of the war depends on each man fighting in the West, and that
means the fate of the Reich as well!”
Hitler saw the
battle coming; he had the enemy, the time and the place correct and still
failed. He had the foresight but not the means to stop the invasion because he
lacked resources. Hitler was facing and fighting the enemy on three land
fronts—Russia, the Mediterranean and now the threat to Western Europe. At the
same time, there was fighting on the home front as the British bombed military
and civilian targets at night and the Americans bombed during the day.
Hitler had to
prioritize, all of the fighting and defending required men and material. In
late 1943 he picked the Western front to receive the logistical support to try
and stop the invasion he saw coming.
But was the
invasion important to the Allies? It certainly was not to the United States
Army Air Corps. The senior officers of the air force were convinced that
around-the-clock bombing of Germany would bring the country to it’s knees. And
they were probably right.
The main reason
for the invasion was to keep Russia in the war. Hitler knew the Allies were a
marriage of convenience—he believed the capitalist societies of the United
States and the United Kingdom were actually the natural enemies of the
communist regime of the Soviet Union. The Cold War that ensued after World War
II would prove him right.
In addition,
Germany and Russia had as recently as 1941 been allies themselves, signing the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact in August of 1939 that carved up Poland.
If Stalin grew tired of the tremoundous casualties he was incurring or became
convinced he could not trust the United States and Britain to wage war on
Germany aggressively, a separate peace with Germany might be possible. Getting
Russia out of the war would allow Hitler to take on the United States and the
UK. Or, in his twisted mind, he perhaps could convince the Americans and
British to ally with capitalist Germany against communist Russia. As early as
1928 Hitler wrote that Germany and England should be allies and perhaps unite
against even the United States—“If England remains true to her great world
political aims, her potential enemies will be France and Russia in Europe and,
in the other parts of the world, especially the American Union in the future.”
The invasions of
North Africa, Sicily and Italy did nothing to prove the mettle of the British
and Americans to Stalin. And he cared less about the sacrifices of the Marine
Corps in the Pacific. Stalin could do the math as easily as anyone else, and
only a stab at the Ruhr valley would keep him in the war. That is why the
British and Americans invaded Normandy.
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