National Socialist Germany faced additional setbacks on the southern front, until this advance was stalled until the end of the war. The Italians had been a liability that weakened the German strategic war effort, which only worsen. General Pietro Badoglio began armistice negotiations with the British and the Americans on 4 August 1943, as the successful invasion of Sicily proved to be the final turning point undermining all confidence in Mussolini as the head of state. German forces then occupied Rome, disarmed Italian troops, and bombed the Italian fleet as it sailed to Malta after the Italian armistice was announced on 8 September. The invasion of Italy took place took place in a two-pronged approach as the invasion of Sicily drew to a close. British Eight Army troops crossed the short distance from Sicily to the “toe” of Italy at Reggio di Calabria in Operation Baytown on 3 September, when Field-Marshal Badoglio signed a secret armistice with the western Allies. General Eisenhower announced the armistice on 8 September.
The American Fifth Army troops deployed for Operation Avalanche landed at Salerno on 9 September, aiming toward seizing this northernmost beach on the Italian western coastline that was within fighter range from Sicily and striking range of the port at Naples. They faced heavy fighting from German troops, which were subdued by timely allied naval bombardment that laid down repeated barrages that disrupted and disintegrated determined German attacks. Their defensive efforts nevertheless precluded a rapid allied advance toward the airfields at Foggia, prior to a planned subsequent rapid advance toward Naples to cut off Axis forces from escaping northward, and allowed for a defensive fighting retreat. The German forces had been prepared for the contingency of an Italian surrender, for which Hitler ordered launching Operation Achse to occupy northern Italy and neutralise the Italian army. German troops thus fought a defensive retreat and attritional fighting until December to the Gustav Line, a strong defensive position that Field-Marshal Albert Kesselring, the German commander in Italy, had prepared across the Italian mainland from coast to coast, which was anchored at the high ground at Monte Cassino. Although German artillery ammunition, air support and reserves were lacking, this defensive line provided natural obstacles in the form of mountainous terrain, rivers, and dense forests restricted the Allies’ freedom of movement until a breakthrough was reached in December 1943 at Ortona.
While the Americans were struggling to establish a beachhead at Salerno, SS Hauptsturmführer special operative Otto Skorzeny rescued Mussolini from the Grand Sasso mountain complex on 12 September. Although Mussolini told Hitler that he did not want to be another Quisling puppet ruler, that was precisely what he became in the so-called Republic of Salò, or Italian Social Republic, governing northern and central Italy, which did not have any executive power and was run as a virtual colony by the German ambassador, Rudolf von Rahm, and by the SS general Karl Wolff. Italians were interned in Germany and used as cheap labour, while industrial machinery was likewise seized and taken to Germany. An estimated 7,500 Italian Jews were rounded up and the vast majority of them were killed. At the same time, this republic with Black Brigades loyalists fighting against opposition to this German puppet state was continually harassed by Italian partisan forces, consisting of communists and Italian army deserters, as well as common bandits, while the fighting to the south of them continued, and allied bombing was concentrated on the industrial cities of Turin, Milan and Genoa.
The western Allies became bogged down in a slow campaign in Italy that did not alleviate much pressure off the eastern front. The Germans were actually able to withdraw troops from Italy and send them east. Meanwhile, Tito’s partisans were more successful at holding down Germans than were the Allied armies in Italy. The Allies were unable to breach the Gustav Line near Monte Cassino, beginning with the initial attack on 17 January 1944, to draw German forces away from the forthcoming landing at Anzio. An attempt to attack north of the Gustav Line at Anzio, Operation Shingle, beginning with amphibiously landing two divisions on 22 January 1944, ended in failure while being contained in this beachhead, as a breakout depended on the Allies breaking through the Gustav Line in the south. This operation had been designed to pierce through the Gustav Line and enable the troops to the south to advance, but the southern forces spent weeks trying to break through the line instead to relieve the troops in their beachhead salient, while General John P. Lucas chose to fortify and defend this position, rather than advancing inland. Repeated attempts to take the monastery at Monte Cassino likewise failed, prior and after a bombing raid on this monastery on 15 February that was poorly coordinated with advancing ground troops in Operation Avenger. An initial breach was made in the Gustav Line on 11 May, and the Monte Cassino strategic linchpin in this area was only finally in allied control on 18 May 1944, largely due to the skill of the French, particularly the Moroccan mountain troops, and the courage of the Polish troops. The Gustav Line was now finally breached, and troops from the southern front finally joined up with the Americans from the beachhead at Salerno on 25 May. A breakout from the Anzio beachhead was likewise staged, and rather than advancing inland to pursue retreating German forces as had been ordered, General Mark Clark opted to advance toward Rome as a prestige target. The German forces then withdrew to the Gothic Line, and waited while the Allies slowly slogged their way north. Rome fell to the Allies on 4 June 1944, but it was of no strategic importance and its capture simply allowed Kesselring to extricate his troops from a very dangerous position, and therefore afforded the Allies an empty victory that was won following merely a few desultory skirmishes. Kesselring hereby established a new defensive Gothic Line to the north, which defended Italy’s industrial and agricultural heartland in the Po valley that had been synchronised with the German war effort.
While the advance in Italy was stalled, planning for the invasion of France was duly executed. The British and then the Americans had planned for a cross-channel invasion of northern France, first after Dunkirk, and then in January 1942, when General George Marshall argued for an early invasion, “Operation Sledgehammer,” a small-scale operation to secure a bridgehead in France in 1942 and to ease the pressure on the Russian front. However, with the “Torch” landings in North Africa these plans had to be shelved. Mountbatten’s appalling mishandling of the Dieppe raid on 19 August 1942, which was perhaps deliberately designed to silence critics of “Torch” and proponents of “Sledgehammer,” further dampened enthusiasm for a cross-channel invasion. Following earlier American military leaders’ opposition to diverting resources for a cross-Channel invasion of France from Britain, the British proposals for “Operation Husky,” the invasion of Sicily from northern Africa to be followed by an invasion of Italy from Sicily, were accepted at the Casablanca in January 1943, thus leading to further postponement of invasion. Planning for “Roundup,” a full-scale invasion of France with thirty American and eighteen British divisions following Bolero, the build-up in England, continued under the new codename Overlord. During this time, three German army groups on the eastern front with overextended logistical supply lines faced eight Soviet ones with material superiority, prior to the planned opening of a new western front.
Field-Marshal Erwin Rommel was responsible for bolstering these fortifications, which had gaps between them as a result of deficient amounts of supplies. Rommel recognised that the invasion of France would take place either at Pas-de-Calais or Normandy, and chose to reinforce the former with available resources through reinforcing the coastal defences to deter the Allies from establishing a beachhead, and distributing armoured units along the coastline region to be deployed for a rapid reaction for waging mobile warfare, and setting up various forms of beach obstacles while expecting landings to be staged at high tide. Although there would be a shorter Channel crossing to Pas-de-Calais, it was relatively well fortified, and therefore the Allies chose to land at Normandy, and could be crossed from separate British ports. Intelligence deception measures by positioning fake military units that could be spotted from the air across from Calais also led German military authorities to expect landings there, when suitable weather conditions could allow for invasion landings, which were postponed several times as a result of this factor. Western Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy in Operation Overlord on 6 June, under the leadership of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the commander-in-chief of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). German forces faced using fixed defences concentrated in the Normandy regions against these amphibious landings, following the earlier allied attempts at Dieppe, Sicily, Salerno and Anzio involving landing large forces ashore and then continually reinforcing them with greater numbers than the defenders. This new onslaught that German military leaders knew was forthcoming was to be stemmed by the so-called “Atlantic Wall,” consisting of a chain of defensive positions on the English Channel coastline, while the time of these landings came as a surprise due to the failure of German military intelligence.
Allied landings in the world’s largest armada of five thousand ships landing 130,000 troops at low tide, and therefore running over open ground without cover, on nearly 130 kilometres of beach coastline, supporting by naval gunfire and aerial bombings. They would primarily face Army Group B under Field-Marshal Rommel, which was responsible for defending the coastline between Normandy and the Belgian border, and the supreme commander west, Field-Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt commanding the Seventh Army covering Normandy, Brittany, and the Bay of Biscay as far south as the Loire River. Although there were over sixty divisions deployed between the Netherlands and southern France that could be concentrated against an Allied invasion of France that could only land a few regiments at a time. Although the plans for Operation Overlord became compromised as a result of the invasion having had been detected from the remains of one of the casualties of a German E-boat attack on an allied training exercise planning for the invasion, Operation Tiger, in late April off the coast of Devonshire, in which 749 personnel were killed, and regardless of the lack of the element of surprise that had been lost as a result of the compromised Operation Fortitude to deceive German defenses that were concentrated at Pas-de-Calais where an invasion had been anticipated, German forces proved to be too weak to repulse this invasion.
German ground forces that lacked sufficient defensive air support were divided among three fronts, with the largest numbers fighting against Russia, smaller amounts holding Italy and the Balkans, along with a third element holding western Europe. During the same time, control of the air and coastal waters was lost. The earlier strategic bombing had crippled Germany’s war industries and greatly weakened German air defences, along with tactical bombing having had destroyed main railroads and bridges in western Europe that impeded the movement of concentrating forces against the landings in Normandy, with allied bombing inflicting damage on transport in France that led to a division requiring two weeks to reach the Normandy front from Holland or detouring from as far east as the Alsace-Lorraine. German defensive positions, including coastal artillery defences and airfields, as well as rail and road networks, were subjected to heavy air attack from April 1944 to prepare for the forthcoming cross-channel invasion, at a time when the Luftwaffe was primarily deployed on the eastern front, and consequently western allied airpower outnumbered the German aircraft by over thirty to one.
Another factor that weakened German defences was the successful allied deception using compromised German espionage in the UK. The cyphering system that the Abwehr employed in Enigma communications, particularly the instructions transmitted to it advance post in Hamburg that extended directions to its network of agents in Britain, was completely exposed to British intelligence from early 1941. Every German agent was consequently executed, incarcerated or converted and used to manipulate their reports from Britain, which were managed to completely deceive the Germans about everything that pertained to the preparation of the invasion of the continent, which included reporting about fictional divisions. Attention to Calais was diverted through the false presumption that twenty to twenty-five divisions of a First U.S. Army Group (FUSAG) would land in Calais as a main effort, whereas the Normandy landings would be secondary ones, as well as fake communication networks and staging areas, of which one appeared to be directed at Norway, among other deceptive devices that were completely successful. Deception led to diverting Rundsted’s defensive forces from Normandy. In addition, Rommel lacked a unity of command, and was therefore left unable to call on approximately nine hundred aircraft and naval assets, in the form of about six U-boats, along with mini submarines and E-boats, in contrast to Eisenhower who had authority over all available assets.
Three Allied airborne divisions were dropped to disrupt German defences before the seaborne landings during the night of 5-6 June. The British Sixth Airborne seized the Orne bridges, disrupted the enemy communications and took a number of strong points which menaced “Sword” beach to the west of Ouistreham. On the Cotentin peninsula, the airborne landings did not go as planned, but this proved to be beneficial in unexpected ways. The Germans were equally bemused by what was going on and since the Americans were widely dispersed, they imagined that they had landed in far greater numbers than was the case. In contrast to meticulous allied preparations, the German garrison troops in France, who were less effective than those deployed on the eastern front, were widely dispersed as Hitler’s tactically unsound compromise solution over earlier disputes about whether to halt an allied invasion at the defensive Atlantic Wall on the beaches, or a defence in depth strategy, while the German navy and air force were largely spent. The Normandy defences were also incomplete without sufficient amounts of available armoured units. Rundstedt maintained a defence in depth strategy, and therefore argued for tanks to be kept as a mobile reserve until an invasion, whereas Rommel argued that tanks were vulnerable to air attack, and were to be deployed close to the coastline. Hitler attempted to resolve this dispute by assigning three armoured divisions to each, while four others were kept in reserve. Panzer Group West could also only be deployed with Hitler’s approval, and the anti-landing elevated mine obstacles on the Normandy beaches were designed for a high rather than a low tide landing that rendered them ineffective at damaging the landing craft.
Von Rundstedt, and Field-Marshal Rommel commander Army Group B believed that these airborne landings were simply diversionary operations, and Rommel had left for Germany convinced that the bad weather would prevent the Allies from risking an invasion. H-hour for D-Day, the code for the invasion, was at 06.30 when the Americans landed at “Utah” and “Omaha” beaches to isolate the Cotentin peninsula, on which the vital city of Cherbourg was situated. The worst fighting was on “Omaha” beach, a formidable obstacle with cliffs as high as two hundred feet and which never should have been attacked by direct assault even under optimal conditions, and rough sea conditions led to twenty-seven out of twenty-nine amphibious tanks being lost before they could reach the beaches, which subjected the infantry to greater risks. Unknown to Allied intelligence the veteran 352nd Infantry Division had been moved into this sector and was in the middle of defensive exercises. Heavy cloud cover meant that bombs had failed to hit the coastal defences. British and Canadian divisions landed on “Gold,” “Juno” and “Sword” beaches, where German defences were understrength, and were then to proceed toward Caen as an important railway and road hub, to be followed by a subsequent advance over the open country toward Falaise. Landing troops at Gold and Juno beaches were linked by the end of D-Day, whereas Sword was split from them by the Twenty-first Panzer Division as the only out of ten armoured divisions in France deployed near the coastline at the time, while Utah and especially Omaha remained very much exposed to a determined German counterattack.
German reserves were not immediately dispatched to reinforce the defensive forces in Normandy, since Hitler still expected further allied landings at other locations after 6 June. Rommel’s Army Group B was nevertheless denied the reserves it requested. Field-Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt had created Panzer Group West in November 1943 as a large mobile reserve capable of reacting to an invasion either in the Fifteenth Army sector in Pas-de-Calais or the Seventh Army sector in Normandy, which Hitler determined in March 1944 would be divided between three divisions allocated to Army Group B, which Rommel could deploy against an allied invasion before a bridgehead could be established, and the other four as part of a mobile reserve stationed outside Paris to be deployed in a large scale counterattack against an allied invasion. These panzer reserves were under the direct operational control of OKW under the direct control of Hitler. They were not released until the evening of 6 June, when Rundstedt received authorisation from Hitler to move the Twelfth SS Panzer Division to Caen, and to activate the Panzer Lehr Division for their movement to the coastline. They did not arrive on the battleground until the next day, when the Allies managed to entrench themselves on the Normandy beaches, when five allied divisions were landed following overwhelming two German divisions covering a fifty-mile front. All four invasion beaches were linked by 12 June while maintaining naval and air superiority, and continually reinforced a vast beachhead that continuously weakened the probability of a successful German counterattack.
The British Second Army and Canadian Third Division consolidated their defensive positions in northern Normandy, and then advanced southward in the face of complications and stiff defensive resistance. British infantry began advancing without armour on the afternoon on 6 June, prior to tank movement impeded by boccage, or box country, in Normandy composed of hedgerows and narrow twisting lanes that composed obstructive terrain that hindered rapid mobile warfare, and provided ideal conditions for German defences and protection for camouflaged German 88 anti-tank guns. British and Canadian troops eventually reached Caen as a key linchpin for the breakout from Normandy on 9 July while facing German counterattacks as Hitler refused to concede any ground. Allied attempts to dislodge German defensive positions took place in the south and southeast in the British led Operation Goodwood launched on 18 July, beginning with a coordinated British and Canadian assault on Caen, who drove the last German defenders from the city on 20 July. This British offensive operation, continued in coordination with the American planned Operation Cobra, beginning on 25 July, later ended in failure as this advance was stalled in the Caen sector, resulting in a battle of attrition from an enormous established bridgehead that German forces could not resist in depth.
American troops would seize Saint Lô, a regional road junction approximately fifteen miles south of the invasion beaches that was the highest point over the river laced and swampy Norman lowlands, on 19 July, which broke through the German left flank on the Cotentin peninsula. A further more significant breakout was staged on 27 July, and then American troops breached the German front at the entrance point into Brittany at Avranches on 25 July in Operation Cobra, which enabled American troops to enter the open fields of the Loire Valley, outside of the Normandy hedgerow country, where mobile warfare was made possible. German forces were also diverted to counter the combined British-Canadian Operation Spring in an advance toward south of Caen on the same day, which was forced back, which diverted German forces from countering American troops engaged in Operation Cobra that achieved a breakthrough and opened a bottleneck by 30 July upon seizing the road junction at Avranches, and the southern end of the Cotentin Peninsula, which broke the final narrow obstacle allowing movement into open countryside. German forces were thus prevented from further containing allied troops from Normandy who would advance to the south and southwest without encountering notable resistance when the breakout from Normandy was completed by 31 July. Apart from applying resources to counter a weak German counterattack to block the Allied advance at Mortain in Normandy in an attempt to divide American forces and then advance northward, Operation Lüttich from 7 to 13 August, the Allied advances from the north and south continued into the remainder of Normandy and Brittany, leading to a convergence of Allied forces Falaise in July and August 1944 that created a pocket, with a narrow passage of escape for surviving troops and units were battered by Allied artillery and air power that would retreat toward the western German border by September to the so-called “West Wall,” or Siegfried Line, consisting of a series of bunkers, anti-tank obstacles and fortified positions, albeit manned with incomplete units without a mobile reserve that could only delay an offensive while German defences were to be restored, although the means for prolonged resistance remained increasingly undermined as a result of onslaughts on separate fronts, diminishing amounts of available personnel, and industrial capacity to generate war material. Allied strategy following completing the breakout from Normandy on 31 July was to trap the German forces attempting to retreat eastward toward Germany from France in the gap between Falaise and Argentan.
During this time, British and American airborne and then glider borne troops and seaborne troops landed on three separate beaches in Provence in southern France on 15 August in Operation Dragoon (formally cited as “Anvil”). This Allied invasion of southern France generated greater pressure on German forces by securing the vital ports on the French Mediterranean coast and opening another front, while German forces remained deployed in northern Italy to contain the Allied advance there. Eisenhower as the western Allied commander-in-chief, insisted was necessary to open Marseilles and Toulouse to supply the armies in France, while the German Nineteenth Army defending the southern coastline was understrength with two-thirds of the armoured units of Army Group G stationed in southern France having had been deployed to counter the Normandy invasion, and subsequently suffered heavy losses in the failed Mortain offensive on 7 August.
Allied forces penetrated 140 miles inland in eight days with the support of French resistance fighters staging sabotage and guerilla warfare in coordination with the British Special Operations Executive and the American Office of Strategic Services personnel planning and coordinating resistance activities, while the German garrisons in Marseilles and Toulon surrendered on 28 August. Allied forces then continued pushing northward and took control of Lyons and joined Eisenhower’s northern army groups from Normandy by 19 September. Most of France was liberated by early September 1944, apart from remaining isolated pockets of German resistance. Facing being surrounded in Falaise when this gap was closed on 21 August, the two remaining German armoured divisions out of eleven of them stationed in the west retreated eastward from the advancing Allies, and abandoned most of their heavy equipment. The Allies thus established military superiority in France that would culminate in the liberation of Paris on 25 August. Isolated German garrisons would hold out at Brest, Lorient, St. Nazaire, La Rochelle, and the Gironde Estuary.
During this time when the western Allies maintained entrenched presences in Normandy, southern France, and southern Italy, the German Army Group Centre on the eastern front ceased to exist as a coherent force as Soviet forces were preparing to advance toward the Vistula. The fighting for the continued existence of the National Socialist regime during the following several months would thus constitute a controlled collapse that delayed Allied advances, while lacking clear communications and orders on how to continue operating to varying degrees as German units became increasingly isolated, and could not coordinate and concentrate their efforts to inflict losses, and were also hampered by fuel shortages that prevented sufficient manouevering, and were subjected to superior Allied air interdiction that prevented the mobility of German armoured and infantry reinforcements to counter the Allied invasion landings, and during the days that followed, while Allied shipping also maintained control of the English Channel, and could also fire their weapons over long distances inland. As the western Allies established considerable advantages in Normandy, Soviet forces were making rapid advances in the east.
Nazi Germany remained under pressure from Soviet advances on the eastern front, where Soviet forces maintained the initiative after the battle of Kursk, and maintained steadily advancing westward in the subsequent Belgorod-Kharkov Offensive Operation, which led to overwhelming German forces at Kharkiv on 23 August 1943, and then Kiev on 6 November when German forces established defensive lines west of the Dnieper River, which were eventually overwhelmed as the Soviet advance continued through western Ukraine until the end of 1943, and maintained numerical advantages in terms of personnel and industrial capacity, and mobility that was facilitated by vehicles provided through Lend-Lease from the U.S. In addition, the Soviets were able to acquire the advantage of air power as Luftwaffe units were withdrawn from the eastern front to defend against the combined British and American bombing offensives from the west, which made German armour and supply columns vulnerable to Soviet air attacks from Sturmovik fighter-bombers. A forceful attack was launched to relieve besieged Leningrad in the Leningrad-Novgorod strategic offensive launched by the Red Army on 14 January 1944, and lifted the siege on 27 January, which then threatened Finland with a Soviet invasion. Soviet advances continued in the south, with the beginning of the invasion of the Crimea on 2 April, where German resistance ended on 12 May. Odessa fell into Soviet control on 10 April 1944, which posed a threat to Romania as their advance would inevitably shift further westward, including targeting the Romanian oil fields at Ploesti, the second largest oil reserves in Europe, which the German war effort depended on to wage mobile warfare, as well as wheat and components for German industries.
German resources were overextended while defending a front extending approximately 1,400 miles along the entire eastern front. One of the results of the Soviet advances was prompting the surprise invasion and occupation of Hungary in Operation Margarethe on 19 March 1944, where the national leadership under Miklós Horthy sought to establish a peace settlement with the western Allies during the autumn of 1943, which came to the attention of German authorities in early 1944. Hungary hereafter was established as a defensive bulwark against the advancing Soviet forces, and maintain the logistical routes to the Romanian oil fields, which became threatened from April 1944. A new offensive launched on 20 August 1944 against the German Army Group South Ukraine reached the Danube within a week, and trapped the German Sixth and Romanian Third armies, and Romania was overrun within a month. Soviet forces then shifted south from Constanza on 28 August, leading to Bulgaria declaring war against Nazi Germany on 4 September, leading to the disintegration of its influence in southeastern Europe, and the irreversible loss of its main supply of oil. Soviet forces then moved into Hungary at the end of September, leading to the Hungarian government seeking an armistice with the Soviet Union in October. After a short lived German occupation of Hungary, Budapest was surrendered to Soviet forces on 13 February 1945, and the German Army Group South ceased to exist.
Finland, which likewise lacked the resources to maintain a prolonged war effort, was also threatened when Soviet forces on the Leningrad front launched an offensive on 9 June toward the Karelian Isthmus, with superior numbers of troops, artillery and aircraft. Finland ultimately suspended all military cooperation with Nazi Germany on 4 September, and reaching a peace settlement with the Soviet Union on 19 September. Finland then turned its forces against Nazi Germany from September 1944 to 25 April 1945 in the “Lapland War,” in which German forces were driven out of Finland as a condition of the armistice with the Soviet Union.
After the invasion of Normandy was regarded as definitely successful and any chance of a setback had been eliminated, the Russians opened their next major counteroffensive targeting the central eastern front on 22 June, Operation Bagration, which breached German defences in several regions along a broad front in the face of overwhelming Soviet resources, including air superiority that harassed German logistics and communications when Luftwaffe units were concentrated on defending against British and American aerial offensives from the west. The key logistical hub at Minsk was overwhelmed on 28 June, and ultimately led to shattering the German Army Group Centre, with approximately twenty-five divisions having been destroyed by 3 July. Subsequent advances led to the fall of Romania on 23 August and Bulgaria on 5 September, leading in turn to German retreats from Greece, Albania and Yugoslavia to Hungary, as well as Nazi Germany losing its primary source of energy supplies. In addition, Romania joined the war effort against the Axis as a result of its peace settlement with the Soviet Union on 12 September. The Soviet advance toward the Baltic Sea led to cutting off German troops in Courland in October, where they would remain stranded until the end of the war. Advances in the south continued through Bulgaria and then Yugoslavia by October. German forces to the north and south were separated, while Soviet forces continued advancing toward Lithuania and into Poland, where the advance was temporarily halted south of Warsaw on the Vistula River, before German forces were ultimately driven out of Poland in January 1945, and a major offensive was launched into East Prussia on 12 January.
The British and Americans and other allied forces, including Canadians, Free French and Poles, continued their advance in both northern and southern France while pressure was mounting on the eastern front. This was the result of adapting an overall broad front strategy of allocating resources relatively evenly among separate units on the front line across western Europe to enable even advances, rather that following a narrow front “knife thrust” option of deploying all available resources into narrow assaults while advancing toward Germany, which was justified by concerns over logistical problems caused by the need to repair the French railway system. Eisenhower believed in maintaining momentum on a wide western front while risking facing supply shortages, while the Germans could be unlikely to maintain their defences over this wide front due to personnel shortages. Following the relatively rapid liberation of France from Normandy and the Riviera, the northward advance continued with the first allied troops entering Belgium on 2 September and Brussels on 3 September, and then Antwerp on 4 September, culminating in liberating most of Belgium in October. Luxemburg City was liberated on 10 September.
As the western Allies were advancing on the western front, the Italian campaign remained largely stalled in the face of the effective German fighting retreat. The Allies launched Operation Olive on 25 August to breach the Gothic Line defensive front, while Kesselring used his inferior forces, which included a lack of air support, as well as the difficult to cross mountainous terrain and foul weather conditions. A breach was initially made during the battle of Rimini from 13 to 21 September, but the Italian campaign would result in a deadlock for the remainder of 1944. It remained for the combined allied forces to overcome the resistance of the German retreating troops who proved to possess skilled tactics, with adept commanders being adept at using available resources while leading motivated and well-trained troops who remained determined to continue fighting to the extent of sacrificing themselves.
Separate challenges were faced on the western front during the slow advance in the Italian campaign. In contrast to Eisenhower’s strategy of advancing over a wide front, Montgomery believed Allied forces were to be concentrated on a powerful assault toward northwestern Germany, following advancing through Belgium and the Netherlands. Montgomery proposed “Operation Market Garden,” to establish a bridgehead on the lower Rhine River in Holland at Eindhoven, Arnhem and Nijmegen, which would outflank the defensive strongholds along the Siegfried Line, or West Wall, composing a range of interlinked and mutually supportive natural and artificial defences that extended from the Netherlands to Switzerland designed to stall enemy advances prior to deploying mobile reserves to stage counterattacks. Advancing to these positions was to open the way for an offensive aimed at the Ruhr following seizing control of bridges over the Maas, Vaal and Rhine rivers. Montgomery also hoped that the airborne troops dropped in Operation Market Garden would be able to destroy the V2 ramps, which were assumed to be somewhere between Amsterdam and Rotterdam.
Market Garden began on 17 September, with dropping over 34,000 airborne troops over Holland behind German lines, aiming at allowing the British Thirtieth Corps to cross the Rhine River and outflank the Siegfried Line. The British First Airborne Division was charged with three strategic bridges and waypoints, whereas the American 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions were to seize four other crossings, and were then to hold a sixty-mile corridor through which British land forces would advance toward the British paratroops. This entire operation was to be completed in forty-eight hours. However, the poor weather conditions in Britain isolated the airborne forces at Arnhem, who could not be provided with air support, and nor could they be properly supplied or reinforced. Further complications were encountered when communications and command functions became compromised as the British Type 22 radios malfunctioned after landing. The British had also ignored “Ultra” information that the headquarters of the Supreme Commander West, Field Marshal Model, were located near Arnhem and that two SS Panzer divisions were lying in wait, which were promptly reinforced. British armour, which were to link with the airborne troops, managed to fight their way through to the Arnhem bridgehead on 24 September, but were then forced back across the Rhine two days later. Most of the troops who were dropped north of the Rhine became isolated, and were subsequently either killed or taken prisoner.
The Germans remained able to contain the British advance, which resulted in the liberation of Nijmegen and Eindhoven as the positive results of Operation Market Garden, which were followed by minor advances to the east, and then to the north in Operation Pheasant. The Battle of the Schelde, beginning in mid-October 1944 to ensure continued use of the port of Antwerp, which consisted of four separate major battles mainly fought by Canadian troops in South Zealand, Operation Switchback, Operation Vitality, and fighting for the island of Walcheren, until the end of this campaign on 8 November, when Holland south of the Maas River came under western allied control, while the remainder of the country would be liberated on 5 May 1945. The US 1st Army was halted during heavy urban fighting at Aachen from 2 to 21 October 1944, and Patton’s US 3rd Army was stopped at Metz. Montgomery’s attempt to turn the German northern flank at Arnhem failed miserably. However, Canadian troops supported by British and Polish contingents managed to make progress toward the Scheldt in the northwest from 2 October, and managed to clear this estuary on 8 November so that the largest port in western Europe at Antwerp could be opened, which gave the Allies access to a deep-water port, and would end the temporary stalemate on the western front. Allied supply convoys would hereafter deliver equipment from the North Sea directly to the front lines.
Three western allied arm groups composing seven separate armies advanced eastward from September 1944 in a broad arc from Belgium to the Swiss border. Field-Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s Twenty-First Army Group were pressing toward the Netherlands, with the Second British Army having overrun Brussels and Antwerp. The American First Army advanced into Liège and Luxemburg City, while the American Third Army established a bridgehead at Metz, with casualties amounting to approximately ten percent of their total strength. The Allies lost twice as many troops after September as they had done in Normandy, where the casualties had been terribly high, and where the Germans were given valuable time to improve their defences. While the British launched Operation Market Garden in Holland, the Americans launched separate offensives to the south.
American army group commanders were empowered with independently formulating plans on crossing the Rhine River as the final natural boundary before invading Germany further eastward. The American commanders under General Hodges initially intended to engage German forces in the area to keep them from reinforcing the front lines farther north in the Battle of Aachen as the first penetration into Germany, and then continue pressing forward to cross the Roer River, and then penetrate the defensive Siegfried Line, and then cross the Rhine River as a natural obstacle, prior to then attacking the Ruhr as Germany’s industrial production heartland. The Germans meanwhile defended this area at high costs since it would serve as a staging area for the 1944 winter offensive, Operation Wacht-am-Rhein, which would be jeopardised if American forces crossed the Roer River running through the Hürtgen Forest. Unbeknownst to the Americans, an advance in this front sector would pose a strategic threat to the secret German staging area preparations for their major forthcoming winter offensive through the Ardennes Forest in a futile political attempt to reach an armistice with the western Allies through a military operation, who remained committed to cooperating with the Soviet Union to execute the demand for unconditional surrender.
A separate series of battles took place from 19 September to 16 December 1944 in the Hürtgen Forest between Belgium and Germany, where the Germans had reinforced their defences after the Normandy invasion, prior to launching Operation Wacht-am-Rhein approximately thirty kilometres to the south, in the interest of neutralising the western front by dividing the British and American forces by advancing to Antwerp as a desperate gamble undermined by fuel shortages, until “miracle weapons” could turn the tide of the war. Fighting in this bitterly contested region in difficult terrain would be largely inconclusive during this time, with heavy casualties incurred by both sides, while poor weather temporarily neutralised Allied air superiority. The German forces later advanced into a salient twenty miles wide and forty miles deep in a quiet and lightly defended sector of the American lines on the Belgian-German border toward the Meuse and Antwerp beyond as a vital allied logistics centre, and because the mountains commanded access to the strategically important Roer Dam at the head of the Ruhr Reservoir that could potentially be used to cause destructive flooding.
The German general staff had been planning a major counteroffensive from August 1944 onward to exploit a weakly defended area that lay between the First and Third US Armies in the Ardennes. The offensive, “Operation Autumn Mist,” was planned for 25 November, when it was hoped that bad weather would cancel out Allied air supremacy that remained being one of the strongest weapons in the war in the west. The Sixth SS Panzer Army, supported on the left by the Fifth Panzer Army, was to break out and head for the Meuse between Liège and Namur. The Sixth SS Panzer Army would then head for Antwerp, protected on their left flank by the Fifth Panzer Army, whose objective was Brussels. This shortened sickle, similar to the plan for the campaign in 1940, was designed to cut off and destroy all the American, British and Commonwealth forces to the north in Belgium and Holland. Hitler thus made an audacious gamble, anticipating forcing the western Allies to evacuate from the continent, and then turn German forces against the advancing Soviets in the east, where they advanced into Romania and Yugoslavia, leading to the withdrawal of German forces in Greece by 18 October, while Soviet forces continued advancing into Hungary on 29 October 1944. American forces first penetrated into Germany itself from the west at Aachen on 2 October, which was occupied on 21 October.
The Ardennes offensive delayed the Allied advance for a few weeks, but at a cost that Hitler could not afford, having lost 120,000 troops and a great deal of valuable equipment in the face of tenacious American defensive efforts, while fuel supplies remained deficient. His new divisions had been wasted and Germany lacked reserves with which to meet the new Soviet offensive in Poland, following the momentum that had been established during Operation Bagration, a new offensive launched toward the Vistula and Oder rivers in January 1945, which led to inflicting losses approximately thirty divisions of German troops. Soviet troops advanced toward Krakow and Breslau without facing significant opposition.
During this time when the German military lost the initiative on every front, the western Allies won back all of the territory they had lost during this offensive by 28 January, when the American troops crossed the Belgian-German frontier in the Ardennes salient, which was followed by a rapid deterioration of the German military situation in the west. A special element in this operation was deploying “Panzer Brigade 15,” composed of English-speaking troops under the forceful leadership of SS Obersturmbannführer Skorzeny in “Operation Grab.” were to be dressed in American uniforms and dropped behind the lines to seize the bridges across the Maas and to conduct sundry sabotage actions. Even Model realised that the entire plan was hopelessly over-ambitious and was out of all proportion to the means available. Hitler would not listen to such objections and denounced Model’s suggestion that the offensive should not go beyond the Meuse as a ”half-solution.” Hitler called his generals and announced that the offensive would cause the Allied front to collapse “with a gigantic thunderclap,” and that the British and Americans would seek a separate peace.
Hitler definitive advantage was the element of surprise, as allied authorities disregarded the signs of German troop buildups on the German-Belgian frontier when momentum was advantageous for the Allies, and the idea of a large scale assault by weakened and demoralised German forces was considered to be unrealistic. Preparations for launching this offensive was also successfully concealed, with reduced amounts of communications being limited to telephone and telegraph lines, rather than over the compromised German radio network, and references to forces involved were disguised as administrative units. The Allies were further deceived by the German troop buildup beginning on the Roer River, which led them to anticipate that the offensive would be launched from that position, rather than through the Ardennes, where front line patrolling was lax, Furthermore, inclement weather and fatigue among flight personnel made air reconnaissance practically non-existent in the weeks prior to this offensive. This lack of security allowed the Germans to concentrate their forces while preventing early warning before staging this offensive.
In spite of this operation’s initial successes on this weak section of the allied front, there would not be a repeat of the same dramatic breakthrough that took place in this region in 1940. German forces encountered experienced and well-equipped mobile formations, and also lacked air superiority. They also lacked sufficient supplies to transport to the stated objectives. German advances were thus ultimately halted from 19 December. The Americans also managed to hold their isolated resistance position at Bastogne and blocked a critical transportation junction within the German advance, which forced German armoured units to detour through secondary roads that added to losing time and fuel. The American units entrenched there were relieved on 26 December by the Third Army, and the weather clearing from 23 December meant being able to exploit their overwhelming air power that resumed assaults on German columns, improvised fuel depots and road junctions at a time when the most advanced German units ran out of fuel and lost their earlier momentum. This battle would continue until mid-January, when the Allies would restore the previous front line.
As the Allies were preparing to attack the German frontier from the north, with fighting continued through Alsace and Lorraine in western France, culminating in their liberation by the end of 1944. Meanwhile, the German high command used their last strong reserve in a bold bid to isolate the British armies in northern France and Belgium through assaulting thinly held allied lines in the Ardennes region on 16 December 1944 with the added advantage of the element of surprise. This Ardennes offensive, Operation Wacht-am-Rheim, launching a Blitzkrieg assault aimed directly at Antwerp as a key re-supply waypoint that greatly outnumbered the Allied divisions deployed there, was to have initial success, as twenty-eight divisions were thrown against four badly positioned American divisions. After initial successes and reaching as far as the Meuse River, this fell short of its objectives while the German forces were short on fuel and bad weather.
Germany’s position in January 1945 clearly demonstrated that the war was lost, but the leading authorities of the regime nevertheless continued a hopeless struggle due to military and political considerations, with available records demonstrating incomplete divisions, fractured logistical systems, and several points of retreat. While the central leadership demanded unconditional resistance, individual commanders made tacit plans for the forthcoming surrender as a pragmatic consideration that were concealed from the political leadership. Fuel production had collapsed, following the systematic collapse of the hydrogenation plants. Armoured units were depleted faster than they could be replaced. Divisions were losing personnel that far exceeded recruitment capacity. The railway system that had supported military capacity was destroyed in critical sectors. The Luftwaffe could no longer function effectively, while the Allied advances continued on different fronts. These reports did not reach Hitler, as military authorities prepared reports for technical analysis, and separate ones for Hitler to mitigate the possibility of reprisals, while the army in early 1945 lacked coherence, and was essentially more fragmented while operating independently in separate sectors in isolated uncoordinated positions that could not sustain defences as a result of shortages of personnel and all types of necessary equipment, weaponry and fuel to withstand Allied offensives.
An Allied counterattack, known as the Battle of the Bulge, was launched in January 1945, which forced the Germans to retreat, at the cost of losing a great deal of equipment at a time when mobile reserves were rapidly marshalled to repulse the earlier German offensive through the Ardennes that failed to materialise Hitler’s delusions about attaining armistice terms with the western Allies. The final Luftwaffe offensive on 1 January, Operation Bodenplatte, which was launched in an attempt to cripple Allied air power in the lowlands, likewise left it without reserves. Operation Nordwind, launched on 31 December 1944, consisting of a series of attacks to retake Alsace. Although the Germans inflicted heavy casualties, they could not break through the allied front line, and resulted in Hitler authorising a retreat on 7 January 1945 that began the following day toward the original lines while German forces were subject to artillery fire and air assaults, and were forced to abandon irreplaceable tanks and artillery during this retreat that was equal to three months of industrial production, and left the strategic reserves exhausted in the west. Germany’s military and political balance of control was left unaltered. German control of France was reduced to only holding the region around the city of Colmar as the final German stronghold in Alsace. American and French forces launched Operation Cheerful to clear the Colmar pocket on 20 January 1944, which was cleared by 8 February 1945, when Hitler agreed to a withdrawal across the Rhine as the final major natural boundary in the west.
Separate and decentralised Germany army units continued fighting with tactical effectiveness fulfilling separate small scale missions, regardless of the overall strategic situation with overwhelming allied artillery and air power and overwhelming resources to sustain their advances, in accordance with individual units being granted freedom of action to make rapid decisions according to local and immediate circumstances. During this time, the strategic situation remained critical, and decision making at the highest levels of authority was rendered practically meaningless in practice. Although there were 7.5 million men in arms and two hundred divisions, only seventy-five divisions were on the critical front from the Carpathians to the Baltic, where the Soviet forces had an overwhelming superiority of eleven to one in infantry, seven to one in tanks and twenty to one in artillery. The Chief of General Staff, Heinz Guderian, tried to convince Hitler of the need for a mobile reserve, but Hitler remained obstinately obsessed with such secondary objectives as the Ardennes offensive and a counterattack in Hungary and would not give his consent. He dismissed assessments of Soviet strength and imagined that a new offensive in the west would bring the British and Americans to the negotiating table. Guderian realistically insisted that the eastern front was in such a fragile state that it could collapse at any moment while the Russians were ready for their final drive to Berlin. A new Soviet Vistula-Oder offensive began on 12 January when Marshal Konev’s troops headed for different targeted cities in Poland and toward Königsberg, which was designed to exploit German weakness in the east. Soviet forces under Field-Marshal Zhukov entered Warsaw on 7 January, and reached the Oder as the last major natural barrier before Berlin at Küstrin on 31 January, with Field-Marshal Konev’s joining his forces on 13 February to form a seventy-five kilometre front along the Neisse.
As the German war effort was collapsing, the Big Three Allies began to discuss the future of Europe again at the Yalta conference from 4 to 11 February 1945. The decisions made at this conference were essentially the confirmation by the Big Three of decisions that had previously been made by subordinate organisations and officials. Thus, an agreement was reached on the final occupation zones in Germany along the lines suggested by the European Advisory Commission, which was also empowered to draw up the final details. An important change was that at Churchill’s insistence Stalin agreed to allow the French a share in the occupation of Germany. Roosevelt’s main concern at Yalta was to reach an agreement on voting procedures for the United Nations Security Council, a problem which had not been resolved at the preparatory conference at Dumbarton Oaks. Stalin eventually accepted the American proposals, which included the right to veto, but in return Roosevelt had to agree to at least two Soviet republics becoming full members of the United Nations. It was further agreed that the founding conference of the United Nations should take place on 25 April 1945 in San Francisco.
The most difficult problem at the conference was that of Poland. Churchill announced that he “could never be content with any settlement which did not leave Poland a free and independent state.” The country had to have a genuinely representative provisional government, and its future would have to be decided by free elections. Stalin replied that for the Soviet Union the Polish question was one of national security. He denounced the London Poles for its anti-Soviet sentiments, and proposed a token enlargement of the Lublin Government so that it would be “more broadly based.” He agreed to the Curzon Line as the eastern frontier, but demanded that the eastern border should be drawn west of Lvov, and proposed the line of the Oder and western Neisse in the west. This matter remained inconclusive, while the Soviet advances continued, while the western Allies pledged to support Soviet offensives by increasing the aerial offensives. One of the most egregious air attacks on Nazi Germany was launched on the evening 13 February against Dresden that had largely been spared from air strikes, in an attempt to cause chaos behind the German eastern front, where anti-aircraft batteries were lacking due to having been shifted eastward to be used against the Soviets. American bombers followed on the next day, and this transportation hub on the Else River would be struck in four waves of attacks, with further Allied advances being made into the Saar in March, and American troops entering Cologne on 5 March, which surrendered on the following day. A further blow to the defence of Nazi Germany took place during Operation Lumberjack on 7 March 1945, when the troops of the First U.S. Army approached Remagen and seized control of the Ludendorff bridge, two weeks before Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s planned Operation Plunder, and enabled the American army to establish a bridgehead on the eastern side of the Rhine.
Continuing Soviet advances trapped the German army group troops in East Prussia, which became destroyed in the second week of April 1945. One of the targets for Soviet forces crossing the Vistula was the Silesian coal fields and steel works that had largely been left unscathed by allied bombing. The Soviets captured the industrial region of Upper Silesia by the end of the month, and Albert Speer promptly informed Hitler that the German economy would collapse within a matter of weeks. Hitler ignored this warning, which he attributed to faint-heartedness and lack of true National Socialist zeal. The Soviets then continued their advance through Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and through Austria, with Vienna falling on 13 April while the advance toward Berlin continued, while western Allied forces crossed onto the eastern bank of the Rhine River.
Separate operations were launched toward the Rhine following the Ardennes offensive as planning to dislodge German forces from west of the Rhine, prior to launching a final offensive eastward. The British launched Operation Veritable from Nijmegen on 8 February 1945, while the Americans launched Operation Grenade for the Ninth Army to cross the Ruhr River and Operation Lumberjack for the Twelfth Army Group to cross the Rhine River to the south in their eastward advance. An advance was made on the western front by the British Twenty-first Army Group in Operation Plunder to cross the Rhine River as the final natural defensive obstacle to invading western Germany, and would then have access to available infrastructure, such as the highways. This offensive made slow advances, until British and Canadian troops managed to press German forces behind the Rhine by 10 March, and crossed the Rhine on 23 March, followed by an airborne assault Operation Varsity on 24 March. American troops acting independently of British command seized control of the Ludendorff bridge at Remagen on 7 March. Two floating pontoon bridges were set up near the Ludendorff bridge on 11 March, and then a third on 20 March, leading to establishing the first allied bridgehead on the eastern bank of the Rhine River while German troops abandoned the Siegfried Line defences. American forces then continued their advance into a twenty-kilometre wide and six-kilometre-deep bridgehead established by 20 March by ferrying across the river at Oppenheim on 22 March. By the end of 24 March, the western Allies established a forty-kilometre bridgehead that was ten kilometer deep on the eastern bank of the Rhine River, in what would become the final set piece battle in the west that would continue resuming. Allied troops would only resume their advance through the Hürtgen Forest from 10 to 17 February 1945.
The Americans overran the economically vital Ruhr in April, surrounding this region on 1 April, where the approximately 325,000 German troops of Army Group B were altogether dissolved as a unit by Field-Marshal Walther Model. The last German resistance in this region ended on 18 April, and thus ended Germany’s ability to continue the war when this industrial heart of Germany was lost. The provisions they received from American forces according to the terms of the Geneva Convention, in terms of food, medical care and protection from vengeful displaced persons, which would encourage further surrenders. The fighting on the western front nevertheless continued as the western Allies advanced on a broad front across western Germany to isolate and contain the final pockets of resistance until the ultimate capitulation, particularly from SS units who considered surrender to be betrayal rather than survival. American forces continued advancing until crossing the Elbe at Magdeburg on 12 April. Twelfth Army under General Walther Wenck was determined to meet the Americans crossing the Elbe at other points between Wittenberg and Dessau. Hitler ordered Wenck on 20 April to attack toward Berlin against the Soviet encirclement, but instead decided to prepare an escape corridor for German troops to surrender to the advancing American forces. Wenck admitted that the war was lost, and committed his forces to fight westward against Soviet opposition to allow for any potential survivors among military and civilian personnel, rather than what he called a dead ideology, to cross into the American lines, with columns of combat ready German units surrendering in orderly manner to the US Ninth Army from 24 April, rather than continuing resistance, regardless of maintaining fighting capability.
The Americans were otherwise slowed down by the fanatical resistance of SS and Hitler Youth units in a well-defended pocket in the Harz mountains. The US 69th Infantry Division met the Soviet 58th Guards Division at 16.40 hours on 25 April, cutting Germany into between north and south. At this time, they were only eighty miles from Berlin with no natural obstacles in their way at a time when the Soviets were still held on the Oder, while the first meeting of Allied and Russian armies too place on the banks of the Elbe River near Torgau on 27 April 1945, which effectively divided Germany into north and south.
The Allies also attempted to break the stalemate in the Italian campaign, launching Operation Grapeshot on 6 April 1945 in a final attempt to break through the Gothic Line, in cooperation with the Committee of National Liberation for Northern Italy of Italian partisans that caused anarchy in the entire Po valley. German forces that were devoid of reserves could only make desperate attempts to hold these defences in the face of superior western allied resources, with combined allied forces breaking into the Po valley by 20 April. Mussolini ordered his Black Brigades militia to fight the partisans, and attempted to flee to Switzerland at the Voltelina Redoubt at the base of the Italian Alps with his personal guard on 25 April, where partisans surrounded and attacked them, and was executed within hours. There was no longer any reason to contain the allied advance, and an armistice surrendering German forces in Italy on 2 May.
As the advance was gathering momentum in the west, Stalin planned for a three-pronged attack toward Berlin, and continue advancing to meet the western Allies at the Elbe River. Marshal Zhukov’s First Belarusian Front would compose the central thrust toward Berlin, while Marshal Ivan Konev’s First Ukrainian Front to the south was deployed to attack across the Neisse River in the direction of Potsdam and Dresden, and Marshal Konstantin Rokossovky’s Second Belarusian Front would advance to the north toward Stettin to preclude German reinforcements from reaching Berlin. Zhukov launched his offensive along the Seelow Heights on 16 April in what became confused chaos as a result of Soviet miscalculations using artillery that made the terrain more difficult to pass, and searchlights reflected onto the attacking troops from clouds of smoke before them. German forces had also prior knowledge of this assault, and were then able to retreat to more defensible positions as the Soviet forces attempted to cross the Oder. In spite of the heavy losses that were incurred to breach this final natural defensive barrier before advancing toward Berlin through applying brute force, Zhukov broke through the German defences on 19 April, while Konev’s forces continued advancing over the Spree River by 18 April.
There was then a regrouping and resuming the attack on the outskirts of Berlin itself on 20 and 21 April, while the Soviet forces in the north remained engaged in heavy fighting, and the encirclement of Berlin was nearly complete. As the remainder of General Helmuth Weidling’s Fifty-Sixth Panzer Corps fought a retreat into the city and other depleted units fought to defend Berlin, the newly created Army Detachment Steiner and the Ninth Army lacked the strength Hitler believed would besiege Soviet troops in the city that continued advancing deeper into the city on 23 April, with an encirclement completed on 24 April, with General Wenck’s Twelfth Army to the south lacking the strength to reinforce the city’s defences. Zhukov’s troops would continue advancing further into the city, until General Weidling as the commander of the city’s defences ordered a surrender on 2 May.
Meanwhile, the Allied advances continued in the east and west. There was a general German withdrawal from southern Alsace to the east bank of the Rhine until 9 February, while the Allied advance was concentrated in the northwest. Montgomery’s Army Group advanced toward the Rhine near Düsseldorf until 2 March. Hitler ordered the bridgehead across the Rhine from Wesel to Krefeld to be held at all costs in order to keep the Dortmund-Ems canal, which was vital for the transportation of coal and steel, open as far as Duisberg. By 10 March the Germans had to abandon the west bank of the Rhine. Further south the US 1st Army reached Cologne on 5 March and drove the Germans back across the Rhine. Scouts of the Hodges’s Ninth Armoured Division found the 350 metre long Ludendorff railway bridge at Remagen still intact on 7 March, when it was used by retreating German troops. American troops stormed the bridge before German pioneer troops were able to destroy it due to insufficiently available explosive force. The Americans then quickly established a bridgehead across the Rhine. The Germans tried desperately to destroy the bridge and actually succeeded in bombing it, but the Americans had built alternative bridges by that time.
Hitler had to content himself with ordering the execution of all those responsible for failing to destroy the bridge. Patton, who depended on speed and initiative, led his Third Army through the Eifel region, and then forced German forces over the Rhine and south over the Mosel, and then crossed the river near Oppenheim between Mainz and Mannheim on 23 March. The German military situation appeared hopeless with Patton over the Rhine, and the Germans abandoned their last bridgehead across the Rhine on 25 March, while fear of draconian reprisals was all that kept the Wehrmacht fighting on the western front. Meanwhile, Eisenhower’s strategy was to surround the fiercely defended Ruhr and send the Twelfth Army Group straight across Germany in the direction of Leipzig and Dresden to meet the Red Army on the Elbe, thus cutting Germany in two. Montgomery would then push towards Hamburg and Lübeck, so isolating the German forces in Denmark and Norway. The US Sixth Army Group would advance towards Linz and crush the German forces in the south against the Alps. Eisenhower was also concerned about the possibility of the Germans forming an Alpine redoubt constituting a southern defensive area, which was not yet disclosed as being a huge hoax, and considered that a rapid advance across Germany would make it impossible for them to move forces south. Berlin was therefore a political rather than a strategic objective that was left to the Russians. Although the Americans were able to set up bridgeheads across the Elbe, from which advances onto Berlin could be staged, General Omar Bradley presumed that this effort could lead to incurring a hundred thousand casualties. This would be a highly costly effort for a prestige objective that they would have to withdraw from following the surrender, and Eisenhower maintained that the future division of Germany did not influence military planning to bring about the surrender. Moreover, Eisenhower remained concerned about the extended lines of communication during the advances to the west and the south, in addition to supplying resources to large amounts of civilians, which included high numbers of liberated prison and concentration camp inmates. During this time, the Red Army prepared the greatest concentration of firepower ever amassed for the forthcoming attack by Zhukov’s First Belorussian Front and Konev’s First Ukrainian Front that would be launched on 16 April.
Montgomery met with some determined opposition from the First Parachute Army as he fought his way through the Teutoburg Forest and the Lüneburg Heath until he crossed the Elbe at Harburg and joined Bradley’s forces at Wittenberge on 24 April. The British had not attacked “Fortress Holland” for fear that the Germans would destroy the dykes on the Zuider Zee and ruin Dutch agriculture for years to come. However, the Dutch were suffering a terrible famine and Eisenhower was able to negotiate what amounted to a separate armistice with the Reich Commissar for the Occupied Netherlands, Seyss-Inquart, on 30 April. The Allies undertook not to attack the German forces in Holland and to provide food for the Dutch. The Germans agreed not to destroy the dykes and to distribute the food. This came too late to save many thousands of Dutch from death by starvation. In the south, Patch’s US Seventh Army reached Nuremberg on 16 April. Hitler ordered that the home of the Reich party rAllies should be defended to the last man, but it was able to hang on for only four days. Eisenhower ordered Patton to halt near the Czechoslovakian border and he headed south through the Bohemian Forest, liberating Karlsbad and Pilsen and reaching Linz on 5 May.
Meanwhile, Hitler issued a series of totally unrealistic operational orders to the Army Group Steiner in the bunker deep below the Reich’s Chancellery on 20 April to establish a defensive line along the Spree and the Oder. Steiner’s army could not break out of the encirclement and the Ninth Army to the southeast of Berlin was also unable to fight its way through to relieve the capital. By 22 April, the Red Army arrived in the suburbs of Berlin, and the city was soon surrounded. Hitler denounced his armed forces for their cowardice and incompetence and at the same time clung to the belief that what Goebbels called the “perverse coalition between plutocracy and bolshevism” would fall apart. He took the death of Roosevelt on 12 April as an encouraging foreboding sign. Nevertheless, the military defeat was made clearly apparent by the leading military authorities of the regime to Hitler in the Berlin bunker on 22 April. Only Martin Bormann, the NSDAP party secretary who had succeeded Rudolf Hess, following his solo flight to Scotland on 10 May 1941, where he hoped to arrange peace talks with the Duke of Hamilton, whom he believed to be a prominent opponent of the British government’s war policy, and Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, remained as the leading authorities of the regime with Hitler inside the Berlin bunker. Meanwhile, there were signs of dissension within the Nazi ranks.
In view of the desperate circumstances in Berlin where the top leadership was going to perish and Hitler accepting defeat, Göring attempted to seize power. He sent a telegram from the Obersalzberg on 23 April, in which he stated as his successor, as he had been named on 1 September 1939, that if he did not hear from Hitler by 22:00, he would assume the leadership of the Reich and begin negotiations with Eisenhower, expecting to become the new head of state in view of Hitler’s decision to remain in besieged Berlin. Bormann, who received this message and was looking to preserve his personal postwar future, filtered this message by claiming to Hitler that it was an act of treachery. Hitler then denounced Göring and stripped him of all his offices and responsibilities. Bormann ordered Göring’s arrest and execution by the SS, but he was rescued from SS custody by Luftwaffe personnel, only to surrender to American troops prior to his suicide in prison, prior to the execution of a death sentence.
Hitler also heard the astonishing news from press abroad on 28 April that Heinrich Himmler, the SS chief, was negotiating an armistice with the western Allies through the intermediary of Count Bernadotte, the vice-president of the Swedish Red Cross. Himmler had in fact dealt directly with the Allies to distance himself from the disintegration of the Nazi regime by preparing for his personal postwar future by attempting to rehabilitate his image. This included having had ordered the release 1,200 Jewish inmates on 15 April as negotiation bargaining chips in a show of goodwill. Hitler also ordered Himmler being stripped of his offices and his arrest. Himmler’s attempt to join the new Dönitz government in Flensburg was rebuffed, and later committed suicide soon after his arrest by British troops.
Regardless of any independent attempts to reach a peace settlement, the Allies maintained their earlier stance on imposing an unconditional surrender. Churchill’s response to Himmler’s peace feelers was that the Germans would have to surrender to all three Allies simultaneously, and Truman agreed. When Hitler heard of the failure of this attempt to split the Grand Alliance, he decided to marry his long-time mistress who he had known for twelve years, Eva Braun, late on the evening of 29 April, and then dictated his political testament shortly thereafter, in which he abolished his office and named Goebbels as chancellor. Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who had never been within the inner circles of the highest levels of political power and someone he considered to be trustworthy, was appointed as Hitler’s successor as president.
Hitler received a telegram from Keitel on the following day, informing him that there was no hope of relieving Berlin. At 15.30, the newly-weds swallowed cyanide and Hitler made doubly sure by shooting himself. The bodies were then soaked in petrol and burnt. Goebbels and Bormann failed to dissuade the Soviet military from the demand for unconditional surrender by requesting a cease fire and conditional surrender with the advancing Soviet troops on the evening of 30 April. Goebbels and his wife killed their six children by having them poisoned, and then committed suicide by gunshot on 1 May. Bormann deceased during an unsuccessful escape attempt from Berlin to reach the new Dönitz government. Berlin was surrendered to the Russians on 2 May, while the fighting continued.
As the Allied advance continued slowly in Italy in late 1944 and early 1945, the German forces were desperately short of fuel and munitions as the supply lines over the Brenner Pass were constantly under attack by Allied aircraft. German military leaders in Italy therefore decided to enter into armistice negotiations in Switzerland with the head of the American Office of Strategic Services, Allen Dulles, to sound out the possibility of a separate surrender of the German forces in northern Italy, which began in earnest on 23 April 1945. Partisans captured Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petracci at Dongo on Lake Como on 27 April. They were shot in the back and hung upside down from the roof of a gas station in Milan on the next day. Other leading fascists were also captured and executed just as the fighting in Italy was going to cease. On 29 April Army Group South-West signed an armistice, and on 2 May, the war ended in Italy.
When Dönitz heard of Hitler’s death his main concern was to end the war as quickly and as advantageously as possible. In a radio address Dönitz announced that the war was still being fought to “save the German people from annihilation by the advancing Bolshevik enemy” and that hostilities would continue against the western Allies only if they attempted to frustrate this aim. On 4 May, Montgomery accepted the capitulation of the German forces in northwestern Germany, Holland and Denmark and the surrender of the German fleet stationed in this area. Dönitz also promptly ordered the end of the U-boat war. Army Group G in southern Germany surrendered to the American Sixth Army Group in Munich on 5 May. Dönitz’s main concern was now to avoid surrendering to the Soviets. Attempts were made to get Eisenhower to agree to a partial surrender in the west when German military authorities signed an unconditional surrender agreement on 7 May, but he refused to discuss anything without a Soviet representative at his headquarters in Rheims, and would not alter his demand for a complete and unconditional surrender. Finally, at Berlin-Karlshorst on 9 May 1945, at 00.16, the surrender was signed. As a result of Dönitz’s delaying tactics, more than half of the troops on the eastern front, some 1,850,000 men, were able to move west, and thus avoid being taken prisoner by the Russians.
Analytic teams
1. Form groups of five, with each to be assigned different roles in each group:
a) proponent: listing points of agreement
b) critic: list points of disagreement
c) example giver: list examples of key concepts
d) summariser: prepare a summary of the most important points
e) questioner: prepare a list of questions about the material
2. Share contents with other groups.
3. Wrap up as a class.
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