How Allies got from D-Day to Berlin
… [If] D-Day was brilliantly planned and executed, the follow-up advance through France in June 1944 was not always so. The Americans were bogged down in the French hedgerows for almost seven weeks, until late July – suffering about 10 times the casualties as were lost from the Normandy landings.
So how did the Allies get from the beaches of Normandy to Germany in less than a year? Largely by overwhelming the Wehrmacht with lots of good soldiers and practical war materiel. If German tanks, mines, machine guns and artillery were superbly crafted, more utilitarian American counterparts were good enough – and about 10 times as numerous.
British and American fighter aircraft were not only as good or better than German models but were far more numerous. By mid-1944, Germany had produced almost no four-engine bombers. The British and Americans built almost 50,000 that, by 1944, were systematically leveling German cities.
Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt were far more pragmatic supreme commanders than the increasingly delusional and sick Adolf Hitler. Allied field generals such as George S. Patton and Bernard Montgomery were comparable to German legends like Gerd von Rundstedt or Erwin Rommel, who were worn out by 1944….