The Western Task Force landed in Morocco after embarkation on the US East Coast, of course, so it's not like a transoceanic landing couldn't be done; same for the FORAGER landing force. and (IIRC) the Canadian 1st Division embarked in the UK and landed in Sicily for HUSKY without a stop along the way. Takes some planning, but certainly not impossible to conduct such an operation.Richard Anderson wrote: ↑04 May 2021, 08:20Sure, but then you get into the problem of sufficient ports to mount the assault from to add to the existing issues. To use the three Saipan divisions in a ship to shore operation you' might have to launch them from US ports to coordinate with the shore to shore operation out of England. Then there is the issue of space at the receiving end as well. BAND was finally deemed too close to the mass of coat artillery extending from Cabourg-Houlgate to Le Havre. For the same reason, SUGAR was not considered for the Cotentin because it was too close to Merville and the mass of batteries extending north to Barfleur. Fundamentally, the notion that the Allies could land anywhere, anytime is flawed, because they actually limited the potential landing places they would assault themselves based upon intelligence estimates of the defenses and their own estimation of the capabilities of those defenses. That the latter estimation was pretty much badly inflated is hindsight.daveshoup2MD wrote: ↑04 May 2021, 06:49Just imagine if they'd tried to mount the BAND assault in Normandy, as well...
And, of course, that while six assault divisions were crossing the Channel in June, 1944, there were two reinforced assault divisions (or three) on their way to the Marianas, from much farther away and in (generally) larger ships, while most of another division had been landed in yet another theater by yet another pool of amphibious craft about two weeks earlier...
I also suspect that putting more divisions into the assault on a wider front would simply have exacerbated the logistical issues that developed due to the piss-poor decision making made by the ASF in Washington with regards to the planning assumptions made by the ETOUSA...which, curiously enough was originally a creature of ASF. Cutbacks to allocations of port and truck companies resulted in slow unloading over the beaches and ports, which was further slowed by lack of clearing capability for the supplies once landed and a disorganized depot system that required months to make reasonably functional; by the end of August, over 200 Liberty ships were swinging at anchor off the beaches waiting to unload, some of which had been idle there for weeks, while ADSEC had little idea of which ships contained what or what to prioritize for unloading...in June/July, 11,073 corn brooms, 12,789 cotton mops, 5,269 large garbage cans, and 32,616 reams of mimeograph paper were unloaded across the beaches (and yeah that's a cruel anecdote and those supplies may have been needed - the paper at least probably was - but it illustrates some of the issues that came with inexperience and attempting to supply large forces over the beach in a sustained continental war was compared to the early Mediterranean and Pacific island campaigns. Nor did those problems go away. As late as November, a major function of the officers of the Armor Section, 12th Army Group was to visit depots in Normandy in search of items like tank tracks, engines, transmissions, and the like, since COMZ had little idea of what was where.
The point about FORAGER (and Biak, for that matter) is that even with even with six+ assault divisions going ashore in Normandy in June, 1944, the Allies had enough lift to put (roughly) another 3-4 assault divisions ashore in Provence (or Micronesia, or New Guinea) at essentially the same time, which makes it clear the OP was in the realm of the possible. Similar concentrations in time occurred (roughly) at the time(s) of HUSKY and TORCH, as well, which could have yielded dividends as well,
As far as some of the rest, it's potentially worth considering what problems arose in the Comm-Z for NW Europe, because of personnel churn, because of the need for the Americans and British to staff up two active theater commands (ETO and MTO), 2-4 army groups, at least two sets of theater-level services of supply, etc., both in terms of leadership and logistics units ... and not just the two armies; the naval shoreside establishments weren't exactly slender, either.