His book on Korea is a pretty good overview I think…
I believe “soft underbelly” was Churchill’s phrase, precise or not. If I recall my reading on the subject, he drew a cartoon of a crocodile and pointed to its belly. Stalin, it was reported, was not impressed. In retrospect, neither am I.
The soft underbelly can easily be seen as the Italians being a very weak part of the Axis so the softest part to attack. If Anzio had gone as planned then maybe people would not be stating that it was the difficult option tying up lots of allied resources on the Gustav line.
Always the “If” though, hindsight looking at what happened and saying choices were good or bad is easy, at the time they were not so easy and lots of other things needed to be considered which are rarely looked at when taking a single action and saying it was a good or bad choice.
Regarding Gallipoli - in spite of British ignorance of local topography, crappy landing sites, and so on, there is just a chance that the operation would have succeeded, at least in its short-term objectives. The senior Turkish officers on the spot left much to be desired, and the initial reaction of Turkish junior officers and troops seems to have been to retreat. However, as recent studies have shown, the fundamental determination of the Ottoman army to defend the country was strong … and then along came Colonel Mustapha Kamal, a charismatic leader if ever there was one. Even allowing for an element of national myth, this was probably the grain that turned the scales against the operation.
Regarding Churchill’s view of the USSR, I doubt whether he harboured any illusions. After all, he was the one who opined that Bolshevism needed to be strangled in its cradle - and he said that at a time when Bolshevism was, in fact, still in its cradle. Best regards, JR.
The original operation against the Turks was not to be a landing at Gallipoli, it was modified from its original plan.
Old British and French Battleships that were not suitable for modern operations were to force their way up to Istanbul and drop troops off to capture the capital and take Turkey out in one swoop.
It was almost purely a Naval affair with the troops being mostly Marines.
We probably haven’t completely exhausted this topic, but I would like to ask our British and Commonwealth friends at this time: Was there anyone in the UK besides Winston Churchill who would have been a good candidate for the premiership and as the man to lead the nation and commonwealth in a time of war? I will be intersted to read your responses.
George Marshall, with Ike as his man in London, wasn’t it?
RS, I don’t see any disagreement here. I may be missing something? I do believe that history had finally caught up with the European imperial powers. The Japanese hastened the day, but the fundamental illogic of a very remote country thousands of miles away - be they French, Dutch, American or British - ruling over a vast territory with rather large populations with very different cultures was drawing to a close. In my opinion, it didn’t much matter if the European power didn’t want to let the colony go - that was, by and large, irrelevant. They just didn’t realize it. The Americans knew that they were going to have to give the Philippines its independence. The Dutch fought Indonesian independence but they may have more easily held back the tide with a fork. I’m not saying the replacement regime was better, just that the day of the Dutch there had passed. The British didn’t want to “lose” India either, but I believe it was inevitable that they would. Considering how rather loyally the Indians had fought alongside the British in her time of need and considering that there was long-standing independence movement in the country, would the English really have benefitted from fighting (after a long and exhausting world war) to retain the sub-continent? In the end it did not. And the French, sigh, I wish they had just left Indo-China when the getting was good.
I am acutely aware of the strong sentiments and powerful nostalgia of the displaced colonials - I am one.
Whaaa…? I am curious, in what way you are ex-colonial, R 744?
As a Texican? , former Republic of Mexico, then Texas…or…
As a C.S.A. citizen recolonised by outcome of the Northern War of Aggression?
My recollection, and I regret that I can’t offer a source, is that Churchill’s reference to the ‘soft belly’ (not underbelly) contemplated an assault on the Mediterranean coast of France and was in his contemplation long before the Italian assault was launched as the best available option from forces deployed to meet Stalin’s demands for an assault by the Western Allies on the Continent.
Edit: I think it’s one of those phrases which has gone, mistakenly by endless repetition, into the language such as the common “Play it again, Sam” from the film Casablanca, which was never said by either character to Sam.
Maybe I missed something in your original post.
As to what, at my age I can’t be expected to remember what I was thinking last night, let alone days beforehand. 
The Americans have to be separated from the others as far as the Philippines were concerned.
At the start of the Pacific War America had held the Philippines for barely four decades as the successor to the Spanish. America had no long history or experience of being a colonial power like the Spanish did there, and like the British, Dutch and French did in their colonies. America lacked the advantage of centuries of colonial domination of the local people and, unlike the European colonial powers in relation to their colonies, was willing to move towards Filipino independence.
I don’t know enough about the details of each European colonial power and its possessions before the war, but my impression is that there weren’t movements likely to win independence in any of them if things continued as they were before Japan attacked, regardless of the level of local opposition to colonial rule. It was only after Japan displaced the European powers that this became possible.
For example, Malaya showed no prospect of displacing British rule before the war, but post-war insurrection eventually contributed to the creation of the independent states of Malaysia and Singapore.
Your confusion is entertaining and to be expected, JAW. 'Just goes to show, you can’t make too many assumptions. As to Texas & Mexico, we stole it fair and square. As to the CSA, had I been alive then - and had my family lived here then - I would have been on Little Round Top at Gettysburg beating back those slavery-loving Rebs. I would have been at one with Sam Houston who thought the whole Confederacy was a botch from beginning to end and a devout Unionist who predicted, in a public speech in Galveston after he resigned the governorship of Texas and on the eve of the War Between the States, that the North would crush the South. How right he was.
You may be referring to Anvil, RS, the invasion of Southern France. As I understand it, the Americans wanted this executed rather quickly following the invasion of Normandy, while the British sought to either delay or cancel it entirely because Brooke did not want resources for his campaign in Italy north of Rome reduced. It went ahead anyway. Much of the initiative in northern Italy had been squandered in any event when Mark Clarke, pretending to be a general but really a bit of a clown, decided he would be Ceasar and “conquer Rome” instead of simply by-passing it.
I thought Anvil as the operation the Americans wanted to undertake on short notice to alleviate pressure on the Soviets in early 1942…
Nope, I am thinking of Operation Sledgehammer…
Anvil’s name was changed to Dragoon. Not entirely sure why. In addition to landing a number of American divisions, 6 or 7 French divisions were also landed at Marseille.
And here is the source of the ‘soft belly’ of Europe, rather than ‘soft underbelly’, quote I recalled in Churchill’s words rather than the ‘soft underbelly’ commonly attributed to him, although contrary to my recollection it refers to Italy rather than Mediterranean France. p.433 in Churchill’s ‘Hinge of Fate’ http://books.google.com.au/books?id=m4KpV6XAbZsC&pg=PA896&lpg=PA896&dq=churchill+hinge+of+fate+“soft+belly”&source=bl&ots=w7nRsPv8nx&sig=-c1Rvpas-4NCKJ6Oxgc0ICTzZ8A&hl=en&sa=X&ei=1TAGUprpJcaQiAfRhYHIDw&ved=0CEMQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=churchill%20hinge%20of%20fate%20"soft%20belly"&f=false
To see p.433, go to ‘Italy’ on the linked page of footnotes and click on the page number.
Clicking on p.586 in the footnotes will show a reference to ‘underbelly of the Axis’, which may have become linked with the previous reference in popular commentary to produce the oft quoted ‘soft underbelly of Europe’, which I still doubt Churchill said, or at least wrote.
It should be noted that regardless of the context of the “soft underbelly” quote, Churchill was in fact a proponent of the invasion of Italy and of attempting to pushing into Austria and the Third Reich through the Alps. Of course, while the Italian Campaign did serve to tie down some of the best German troops preventing them from being sent to other theaters, the terrain was completely antithetical to a quick mechanized advance as most forum readers know…
We’ll have to differ on this one, RS. It isn’t what he wrote in his history of the war that matters, but what he purportedly (and reportedly) actually said. The operative phrase is “soft underbelly” of Italy/Europe/the Axis. Not that any of this matters a whit - the troops were on the Mediterranean coast facing Sicily and Italy via the Strait of Messina. It made sense from a purely geographical and logistical perspective that the Allies would “go there”, but Italy was anything but a “soft underbelly.”
Reading some of the history on what were classed as Brushfire or Britains Small wars post WW2 you see a general theme come out.
The allies (and to an extent the Japanese) trained and equipped local forces with almost no regard for their eventual loyalty - just they were fighting the enemy
A huge amount of weapons and supplies were available post war which were never there for independence movements prior to WW2.
Promises were made about independence (by both sides) in order to secure support for themselves.
Large communist movements able to take advantage of the post war situation (many of the former colonial powers could not send troops back to the former colonies for years afterwards and some could only provide a limited colonial government).