How General Eisenhower won D-Day by defeating Winston Churchill, who adamantly opposed the invasion

General Dwight D. Eisenhower

The Code Name for the invasion of Normandy, France on June 6, 1944, was “D-Day,” and history reveals that the Allied invasion was the major event in bringing down Adolf Hitler and Germany in World War II.

What history does not always reveal is how the British were strongly opposed to the plan for the invasion devised by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied troops, and other generals.

The plan was meticulously designed. More than 150,000 troops from the U.S., the U.K., Canada, France, and Norway participated in the invasion.

There were many heroes in this: 8,230 from the United States, 2.700 from Great Britain, and 1,074 from Canada lost their lives in the conflict.

In the first week of the conflict, more than 326,000 Allied troops crossed into France to drive the Germans back to their country. The troops used more than 100,000 tons of military equipment, and by August 25, the Allies had prevailed.

However, prior to the battle, Gen. Eisenhower threatened to resign if British Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not give up his quest to destroy the plan.

Here is that story.

General begged President Roosevelt for approval

The Allied generals had agreed on the plans for the D-Day invasion, but the British opposed it. The battle became confrontational, and Gen. Eisenhower had to beg President Roosevelt to follow the generals' plan,

As the Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe and leader of the D-Day invasion, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower became legendary for his ability to get officers and armies from different nations to work together to defeat Nazi Germany.

But if needed, he was also willing to take a more confrontational approach.

In fact, just a few months before the critical D-Day invasion, Eisenhower threatened to quit his command and go back to the United States. Eisenhower had been in heated talks with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill over a controversial plan to bomb the French railway and road system ahead of the Normandy invasion.

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The focus on the confrontation was whether or not to bomb the French infrastructure that the Germans could use to counter the Allied invasion,

The so-called Transportation Plan, largely devised by British zoologist-turned-military strategist named Solly Zuckerman with the help of British Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, called for diverting Allied strategic bombers that had been hammering German industrial plants. Instead, Eisenhower wanted them to temporarily shift to a new mission—crippling the transportation infrastructure that the Germans might use to move troops and equipment to the coastal region, thus hindering them from rushing to counter the Allied invasion force.

“Eisenhower wanted to use our heavy strategic bombers, the big four-engine planes that were built to destroy German cities and the economy, and send them to wreck the French roads and railway system,” explains Robert Citino, executive director of the Institute for the Study of War and Democracy and senior historian at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans.

For Eisenhower, the switch in bombing seemed like a no-brainer. He knew that landing a massive invasion force and overcoming the elaborate layers of defenses that the Germans had built along the coast would be an incredibly difficult task, and the consequences of a failure would be catastrophic.

“He thought he had to do everything possible to make sure Rommel couldn’t kick them off the beaches,” explains military historian Carlo D’Este, author of biographies of both Eisenhower and Churchill. “The Transportation plan played into that. He probably thought, we’ve got to have every advantage we can get, to avoid a disaster.”

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Battle with the Air Force

The Air Force disagreed with Eisenhower’s plan and wanted to continue their bombardment of the German cities,

But Arthur “Bomber” Harris, head of the Royal Air Force’s strategic bomber command, and his American counterpart, Gen. Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, didn’t see it that way. They weren’t under Eisenhower’s command, and their crews were accustomed to attacking massive industrial plants and German cities, not railroad switches and stations scattered across the countryside. To them, it seemed like a waste of resources, a diversion from their real mission.

“They wanted to keep bombing German cities,” Citino says. “They thought that was the quickest way to end the war. That might seem like the height of naivete today, but people believed it at the time. The air forces wanted to prove that they could win the war on their own. You want to bomb Berlin, and instead you’re being told to bomb some podunk French village because it’s got a railway crossing.”

“That was probably Eisenhower’s biggest frustration—his lack of control over the air forces, and their unwillingness to listen to him and desire to go their own way,” D’Este says.

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Threat to resign worked

Churchill opposed the bombing of French infrastructure and battled with Ike,

To make matters even worse for Eisenhower, the Transportation Plan had another, even more powerful opponent—Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who already was feeling uneasy about the invasion, since the depleted British army—"they were running on fumes,” D’Este explains—couldn’t afford another punishing setback. Added to that was another dilemma. Eisenhower wanted to drop bombs on France, an Allied country that the British and Americans were supposed to be liberating, and in addition to destroying the railroads, the raids ran the risk of inflicting casualties among the French civilian population.

On March 22, Eisenhower dictated a memo that detailed the history of the dispute. By the time that he finished it, he was so irked that he bluntly stated that if his opponents didn’t give in quickly, he planned “to take drastic action and inform the Combined Chiefs of Staff that unless the matter is settled, at once I will request relief from this Command.”

He made the threat more explicitly in a conversation with Tedder, the British officer who backed Eisenhower’s plan. “By God,” Eisenhower told him, “You tell that bunch that if they can’t get together and stop quarreling like children, I will tell the prime minister to get someone else to run this damned war. I’ll quit.”

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President Roosevelt strongly supported Eisenhower, and rest is history.