The Mighty Endeavor

In my time playing war games, I've only played a handful of wargames. Truly not very many: Normandy '44, the Dark Summer, and (if this counts as a wargame) Memoir '44. That's it. I have a long list of Normandy games that I'd like to play one day, including the Killing Ground, the Longest Day, and GMT's The Battle of Normandy. I can now add The Mighty Endeavor to this series of games on Normandy, though and the great appeal of The Gamer's SCS game on the invasion of France is that the Allied player can select any of the beaches in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands to invade. The Allies get six invasion beaches and a host of suitable options to pick from. 

The endeavor to liberate France and cross into Germany started with the invasion of beaches west of Bordeaux. The beaches were big enough to permit a landing of two armies, the British 2nd Army and the American 1st. The benefit of landing in Bordeaux was there are suitable beaches to support a major landing and fewer mechanized forces within immediate reach of the beachheads. The port of Bordeaux is also big enough to accommodate landbased routes of supply for Allied armies in France. 

The only problem that I encountered with landing in southern France was that once I had a taken Bordeaux (and significantly reduced the 2nd British Army's fighting force for the month of June), I did not have enough trucks on the continent to race for Paris. That was the benefit to making a landing in Normandy: the proximity to coastal ports like Cherbourg, Le Havre, Boulogne-sur-Mer, Antwerp, etc. 

The Germans retreated from Bordeaux toward the Loire and the mountains in Southern France. The 9th Army landed in the Riviera (Operation Dragoon) to augment 1st Army's forces and bring the French onto the field. The Germans kept both armies at bay in the mountains and fell back on their river lines. Only the lack of trucks slowed the Americans and French down. Then the Canadians and more American troops landed at Normandy. That rended the German river line useless. Caught between the Commonwealth troops in the north and the Americans and French in the south, the Germans fell back on the Franco-German Border and the river lines in the low countries.

The British troops landed at Normandy made the thrust across the Seine to take Paris. After that, it was helter skelter for the Germans back to the rear. The organized retreat turned into a rout. With enough trucks to keep up with the front, the American 9th and 3rd Armies managed to isolate a several pockets of retreating German infantry and armor. The Germans still had enough troops to man the West Wall, but once the front stabilized and the Americans landed the bulk of their armor, even the toughest sections fell to repeated attacks.

By the end of the year, the Germans had fallen back to their side of the Rhine and the concentration of the best SS and armored units in the Ruhr still couldn't hold back the Allied armor. On top of that, the 1st Army was in position to break out of Arnhem. Given the forces they had left, there was no way to prevent the Allies from achieving total victory.

And that was it. Total defeat for the Nazis. As it should always be.