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International Conference On World War II

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At the 2014 International Conference on World War II held in New Orleans, Louisiana on 6 December, Dr. Roger Cirillo, Director, Book Programs at the Association of United States Army, was asked to speak on the Allied Forces’ strategy to defeat Germany in the fall of 1944. Dr. Cirillo, pulling no punches, questioned the intellect of General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s decision to employ a ‘broad-front’ approach against German forces scattered throughout Europe in late 1944. It was on this issue Eisenhower was at odds with British Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery who supported quite a different strategy that would have instead concentrated allied power against Germany’s industrial base utilizing a ‘single-thrust’ attack. A hotly contested debate still today, there is no shortage of opinion concerning the two different strategies. Dr. Cirillo is unmistakably an admirer of British military thinking and how the war may have been influenced by concentrating allied efforts on German centers of gravity, as proposed by Montgomery. Obviously dismissive of the larger U.S. objectives and perhaps narrow-mindedly taking strong opposition to Eisenhower’s broad-front strategy given his British military school training, Dr. Cirillo’s criticism of Eisenhower fails to account for the positive effects of denying the enemy large swaths of territory, American and British public opinion at the time, and efforts to maintain Soviet assistance in the war, and differing thoughts on Germany’s

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