Forgotten Fights: Operation Dragoon and the Decline of the Anglo-American Alliance
Operation Dragoon was the successful Allied invasion of southern France that also highlighted the intense Allied disagreements over strategy.
August 17, 2020
Operation Dragoon (formerly Anvil) was a hugely successful Allied operation that occurred in southern France in August, 1944. It was part of the Allied campaigns that occupied 1944. Unlike other venerated and popular operations of that year, namely operations Overlord and Market Garden, historians have relegated Dragoon to passing mentions in most histories of the war. To do so is a mistake, because closer examination of the operation reveals the complex ways that Allied relations functioned and became strained during the penultimate year of the war, and how those problems persisted in postwar writing about the operation.
Operation Anvil first appeared on the Allied docket after the Allied conference at Tehran in December 1943. It was the first time English Prime Minister Winston Churchill, American President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin met. At the conference, the three men and their staffs debated the operational roster for 1944. All agreed to support Overlord, the Allied invasion of Normandy. Stalin also promised a summer operation against the Germans on the Eastern Front (Operation Bagration.) Churchill wanted to advance Allied operations in the Mediterranean, preferably against the Balkans. Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower, with Roosevelt’s backing, supported an invasion of southern France. Stalin backed Roosevelt, much to Churchill’s chagrin. The consensus was that the best way to support Overlord would be an accompanying operation in southern France. The two operations would act as a pincer that clamped down on German forces in France. At the end of the conference, Operation Anvil became one of the two “supreme operations of 1944.” Allied strategists said of Anvil and Overlord, “nothing must be undertaken…which hazards the success of these two operations.”
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/operation-dragoon-anglo-american-alliance
