With the
Luftwaffe unable to defeat the
RAF in the
Battle of Britain, the
invasion of Great Britain could no longer be thought of as an option. While the majority of the German army was mustered for the
invasion of the Soviet Union, construction began on the
Atlantic Wall – a series of defensive
fortifications along the French coast of the
English Channel. These were built in anticipation of an Allied invasion of France. 's pebble beach and cliff immediately following the raid on 19 August 1942. A
scout car has been abandoned. Because of the massive logistical obstacles a cross-channel invasion would face, the Allied high command decided to conduct a practice attack against the French coast. On 19 August 1942, the Allies began the
Dieppe Raid, an attack on
Dieppe, France. Most of the troops were Canadian, with some British contingents and a small American and Free French presence along with British and Polish naval support. The raid was a disaster, almost two-thirds of the attacking force became casualties. However, much was learned as a result of the operation – these lessons would be put to good use in the subsequent invasion. For almost two years, there was no land-fighting on the Western Front with the exception of
commando raids and the
guerrilla actions of the
resistance aided by the
Special Operations Executive (SOE) and
Office of Strategic Services (OSS). However, in the meantime, the Allies took the war to Germany, with a
strategic bombing campaign - the US
Eighth Air Force bombing Germany by day and
RAF Bomber Command bombing by night. The bulk of the Allied armies were occupied in the
Mediterranean, seeking to clear the sea lanes to the
Indian Ocean, repulse the Axis from North Africa, and commence the invasion of Italy, partly to capture the
Foggia Airfield Complex. Two early British raids for which battle honours were awarded were
Operation Collar in Boulogne (24 June 1940) and
Operation Ambassador in Guernsey (14–15 July 1940). The raids for which the British awarded the "North-West Europe Campaign of 1942"
battle honour were:
Operation Biting – Bruneval (27–28 February 1942),
St Nazaire (27–28 March 1942),
Operation Myrmidon – Bayonne (5 April 1942),
Operation Abercrombie – Hardelot (21–22 April 1942),
Dieppe (19 August 1942) and
Operation Frankton – Gironde (7–12 December 1942). A raid on
Sark on the night of 3/4 October 1942 is notable because a few days after the incursion the Germans issued a
propaganda communiqué implying at least one prisoner had escaped and two were shot while resisting having their hands tied. This instance of tying prisoner's hands contributed to Hitler's decision to issue his
Commando Order instructing that all captured
Commandos or Commando-type personnel were to be executed as a matter of procedure. visiting the
Atlantic Wall defences near the Belgian port of
Ostend By the summer of 1944, when an expectation of an Allied invasion was freely admitted by German commanders, the disposition of troops facing it came under the command of
OB West (HQ in
Paris). In turn, it commanded: the
Wehrmacht Netherlands Command (
Wehrmachtbefehlshaber Niederlande) or WBN, covering the Dutch and
Belgian coasts;
Army Group B, covering the coast of northern France with the German
15th Army (HQ in
Tourcoing), in the area north of the
Seine and the
7th Army, (HQ in
Le Mans), between the Seine and the
Loire defending the English Channel and the Atlantic coast; and
Army Group G with responsibility for the
Bay of Biscay coast and
Vichy France, with its
1st Army, (HQ in
Bordeaux), responsible for the Atlantic coast between the Loire and the Spanish border and the
19th Army, (HQ in
Avignon), responsible for the
Mediterranean coast. It was not possible to predict where the Allies might choose to launch their invasion. The chance of an amphibious landing necessitated the substantial dispersal of the German mobile reserves, which contained the majority of their panzer troops. Each army group was allocated its mobile reserves. Army Group B had the
2nd Panzer Division in northern France,
116th Panzer Division in the Paris area, and the
21st Panzer Division in Normandy. Army Group G, considering the possibility of an invasion on the Atlantic coast, had dispersed its mobile reserves, locating the
11th Panzer Division in
Gironde, the
2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich refitting around the southern French town of
Montauban, and the
9th Panzer Division stationed in the
Rhone delta area. The OKW retained a substantial reserve of such mobile divisions also, but these were dispersed over a large area: the
1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler was still in the
Netherlands, the
12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend and the
Panzer-Lehr Division were located in the Paris–Orleans area, since the Normandy coastal defence sectors or (
Küstenverteitigungsabschnitte – KVA) were considered the most likely areas for an invasion. The
17th SS Panzergrenadier Division Götz von Berlichingen was located just south of the Loire in the vicinity of Tours. == 1944–1945: The Second Front ==
Allied landing in Normandy invasion On 6 June 1944, the Allies began
Operation Overlord (also known as "
D-Day") – the long-awaited
liberation of France. The deception plans,
Operation Fortitude and
Operation Bodyguard, had the Germans convinced that the invasion would occur in the
Pas-de-Calais, while the real target was
Normandy. Following two months of slow fighting in
hedgerow country,
Operation Cobra allowed the Americans to break out at the western end of the
lodgement. Soon after, the Allies were racing across France. They encircled around 200,000 Germans in the
Falaise Pocket. As had so often happened on the
Eastern Front Hitler refused to allow a strategic withdrawal until it was too late. Approximately 150,000 Germans were able to escape from the Falaise pocket, but they left behind most of their irreplaceable equipment and 50,000 Germans were killed or taken
prisoner. The Allies had been arguing about whether to advance on a broad-front or a narrow-front from before D-Day. If the British had broken out of the Normandy
bridgehead (or
beachhead) around
Caen when they launched
Operation Goodwood and pushed along the coast,
facts on the ground might have turned the argument in favour of a narrow front. However, as the breakout took place during Operation Cobra at the western end of the bridge-head, the
21st Army Group that included the
British and
Canadian forces swung east and headed for Belgium, the Netherlands and Northern Germany, while the
U.S. Twelfth Army Group advanced to their south via eastern France, Luxembourg and the
Ruhr Area, rapidly fanning out into a broad front. As this was the strategy favoured by the
Supreme Allied Commander,
General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and most of the American high command, it was soon adopted.
Liberation of France , 26 August 1944. On 15 August the Allies launched
Operation Dragoon – the invasion of Southern France between
Toulon and
Cannes. The
US Seventh Army and the
French First Army, making up the
US 6th Army Group, rapidly consolidated this beachhead and liberated Southern France in two weeks; they then moved north up the Rhone valley. Their advance only slowed down as they encountered regrouped and entrenched German troops in the
Vosges Mountains. The Germans in France were now faced by three powerful Allied army groups: in the north the British 21st Army Group commanded by Field Marshal Sir
Bernard Montgomery, in the center the American 12th Army Group, commanded by General
Omar Bradley and to the south the US 6th Army Group commanded by Lieutenant General
Jacob L. Devers. By mid-September, the 6th Army Group, advancing from the south, came into contact with Bradley's formations advancing from the west and overall control of Devers' force passed from
AFHQ in the Mediterranean so that all three army groups came under Eisenhower's central command at
SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Forces). Under the onslaught in both the north and south of France, the German Army fell back. On 19 August, the
French Resistance (
FFI) organised a general uprising and the
liberation of Paris took place on 25 August when general
Dietrich von Choltitz accepted the French
ultimatum and surrendered to General
Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque, commander of the
Free French 2nd Armored Division, ignoring orders from Hitler that Paris should be held to the last and destroyed. The liberation of Northern France and the
Benelux countries was of special significance for the inhabitants of London and the southeast of England because it denied the Germans launch sites for their mobile
V-1 and
V-2 Vergeltungswaffen (reprisal weapons). As the Allies advanced across France, their supply lines stretched to breaking point. The
Red Ball Express, the Allied trucking effort, was simply unable to transport enough supplies from the port facilities in Normandy all the way to the front line, which by September, was close to the German border. Major German units in the French southwest that had not been committed in Normandy withdrew, either eastwards towards Alsace (sometimes directly across the US 6th Army Group's advance) or into the ports with the intention of denying them to the Allies. These latter groups were not thought worth much effort and were left "to rot", with the exception of
Bordeaux, which was liberated in May 1945 by French forces under General
Edgard de Larminat (Operation Venerable).
Allied advance from Paris to the Rhine into Germany. Fighting on the Western front seemed to stabilize, and the Allied advance stalled in front of the
Siegfried Line (
Westwall) and the southern reaches of the Rhine. Starting in early September, the Americans began slow and bloody fighting through the
Hurtgen Forest ("
Passchendaele with tree bursts"—
Hemingway) to breach the Line. The port of
Antwerp was liberated on 4 September by the
British 11th Armoured Division. However, it lay at the end of the long
Scheldt Estuary, and so it could not be used until its approaches were clear of heavily fortified German positions. The
Breskens pocket on the southern bank of the
Scheldt was cleared with heavy casualties by Allied forces in
Operation Switchback, during the
Battle of the Scheldt. This was followed by a tedious campaign to clear a peninsula dominating the estuary, and finally, the amphibious assault on
Walcheren Island in November. The campaign to clear the Scheldt Estuary along with
Operation Pheasant was a decisive victory for the Allies, as it allowed a greatly improved delivery of supplies directly from Antwerp, which was far closer to the front than the Normandy beaches. In October the Americans decided that they could not just
invest Aachen and let it fall in a slow siege, because it threatened the flanks of the
U.S. Ninth Army. As it was the first major German city to face capture, Hitler ordered that the city be held at all costs. In the resulting
battle, the city was taken, at a cost of 5,000 casualties on both sides, with an additional 5,600 German prisoners. South of the
Ardennes, American forces fought from September until mid-December to push the Germans out of Lorraine and from behind the Siegfried Line. The crossing of the
Moselle River and the capture of the fortress of
Metz proved difficult for the American troops in the face of German reinforcements, supply shortages, and unfavorable weather. During September and October, the Allied 6th Army Group (
U.S. Seventh Army and
French First Army) fought a difficult campaign through the Vosges Mountains that was marked by dogged German resistance and slow advances. In November, however, the German front snapped under the pressure, resulting in sudden Allied advances that liberated
Belfort,
Mulhouse, and
Strasbourg, and placed Allied forces along the
Rhine River. The Germans managed to hold a large bridgehead (the
Colmar Pocket), on the western bank of the Rhine and centered around the city of
Colmar. On 16 November the Allies started a large scale autumn offensive called
Operation Queen. With its main thrust again through the
Hürtgen Forest, the offensive drove the Allies to the
Rur River, but failed in its core objectives to capture the Rur dams and pave the way towards the Rhine. The Allied operations were then succeeded by the German
Ardennes offensive.
Operation Market Garden . The port of Antwerp was liberated on 4 September by the British 11th Armoured Division.
Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery, commanding the Anglo-Canadian 21st Army Group, persuaded the
Allied High Command to launch a bold attack,
Operation Market Garden, which he hoped would get the Allies across the Rhine and create the narrow-front he favoured.
Airborne troops would fly in from the United Kingdom and take bridges over the main rivers of the German-occupied Netherlands in three main cities;
Eindhoven,
Nijmegen, and
Arnhem. The
British XXX Corps would punch through the German lines along the Maas–Schelde canal and link up with the airborne troops of the
U.S. 101st Airborne Division in Eindhoven, the
U.S. 82nd Airborne Division at Nijmegen and the
British 1st Airborne Division at Arnhem. If all went well XXX Corps would advance into Germany without any remaining major obstacles. XXX Corps was able to advance beyond six of the seven airborne-held bridges but was unable to link up with the troops near the bridge over the Rhine at Arnhem. The result was the near-destruction of the British 1st Airborne Division during the
Battle of Arnhem, which sustained almost 8,000 casualties. The offensive ended with Arnhem remaining in German hands and the Allies holding an extended salient from the Belgian border to the area between Nijmegen and Arnhem. A German
attempt to recapture the salient ended in failure in early October.
Winter counter-offensives during the
Battle of the Bulge The Germans had been preparing a massive counter-attack in the West since the Allied breakout from Normandy. The plan called
Wacht am Rhein ("Watch on the Rhine") was to attack through the Ardennes and swing north to Antwerp, splitting the American and British armies. The attack started on 16 December in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge. Defending the Ardennes were troops of the US First Army. Initial successes in bad weather, which gave them cover from the Allied air forces, resulted in a German penetration of over to within less than of the
Meuse. Having been taken by surprise, the Allies regrouped and the Germans were stopped by a combined air and land counter-attack which eventually pushed them back to their starting points by 25 January 1945. The Germans launched a second, smaller offensive (
Nordwind) into
Alsace on 1 January 1945. Aiming to recapture Strasbourg, the Germans attacked the 6th Army Group at multiple points. Because the Allied lines had become severely stretched in response to the crisis in the Ardennes, holding and throwing back the
Nordwind offensive was a costly affair that lasted almost four weeks. The culmination of Allied counter-attacks restored the front line to the area of the German border and collapsed the
Colmar Pocket.
Invasion of Germany In January 1945 the German bridgehead over the river
Roer between Heinsberg and Roermond was cleared during
Operation Blackcock. This was followed by a pincer movement of the
First Canadian Army in
Operation Veritable advancing from the Nijmegen area of the Netherlands, and the US Ninth Army crossing the Roer in
Operation Grenade. Veritable and Grenade were planned to start on 8 February 1945, but Grenade was delayed by two weeks when the Germans flooded the Roer valley by destroying the gates of the
Rur Dam upstream. Field Marshal
Gerd von Rundstedt requested permission to withdraw east behind the Rhine, arguing that further resistance would only delay the inevitable, but was ordered by Hitler to fight where his forces stood. By the time the water had subsided and the US Ninth Army was able to cross the Roer on 23 February, other Allied forces were also close to the Rhine's west bank. Von Rundstedt's divisions, which had remained on the west bank, were cut to pieces in the '
Battle of the Rhineland' – 280,000 men were taken prisoner. With a large number of men captured, the stubborn German resistance during the Allied campaign to reach the Rhine in February and March 1945 had been costly. Total losses reached an estimated 400,000 men. By the time they prepared to cross the Rhine in late March, the Western Allies had taken 1,300,000 German soldiers prisoner in western Europe. cross the
Rhine river in assault boats. The crossing of the Rhine was achieved at four points: • One was an opportunity taken by US forces when the Germans failed to blow up the
Ludendorff bridge at
Remagen. Bradley and his subordinates quickly exploited the Remagen crossing made on 7 March and expanded the bridgehead into a full-scale crossing. • Bradley told General Patton whose
U.S. Third Army had been fighting through the
Palatinate, to "take the Rhine on the run". The Third Army did just that on the night of 22 March, crossing the river with a hasty assault south of
Mainz at
Oppenheim. • In the North
Operation Plunder was the name given to the assault crossing of the Rhine at
Rees and
Wesel by the British 21st Army Group on the night of 23 March. It included the largest airborne operation in history, which was codenamed
Operation Varsity. At the point the British crossed the river, it is twice as wide, with a far higher volume of water, as the points where the Americans crossed and Montgomery decided it could only be crossed with a carefully planned operation. • In the Allied 6th Army Group area, the US Seventh Army assaulted across the Rhine in the area between
Mannheim and
Worms on 26 March. • A fifth crossing on a much smaller scale was later achieved by the French First Army at
Speyer. Once the Allies had crossed the Rhine, the British fanned out northeast towards
Hamburg crossing the river
Elbe and on towards Denmark and the Baltic. British forces captured
Bremen on 26 April after a week of combat. British and Canadian paratroopers reached the Baltic city of
Wismar just ahead of Soviet forces on 2 May. The US Ninth Army, which had remained under British command since the battle of the Bulge, went south as the northern pincer of the
Ruhr encirclement as well as pushing elements east. XIX Corps of the Ninth Army captured
Magdeburg on 18 April and the US XIII Corps to the north occupied
Stendal. The US 12th Army Group fanned out, and the First Army went north as the southern pincer of the Ruhr encirclement. On 4 April the encirclement was completed and the Ninth Army reverted to the command of Bradley's 12th Army Group. The German Army Group B commanded by Field Marshal
Walther Model was trapped in the Ruhr Pocket and 300,000 soldiers became POWs. The Ninth and First American armies then turned east and pushed to the Elbe river by mid-April. During the push east, the cities of
Frankfurt am Main,
Kassel, Magdeburg,
Halle and
Leipzig were strongly defended by ad hoc German garrisons made up of regular troops,
Flak units,
Volkssturm and armed Nazi Party auxiliaries. Generals Eisenhower and Bradley concluded that pushing beyond the Elbe made no sense since eastern Germany was destined in any case to be occupied by the
Red Army. The First and Ninth Armies stopped along the Elbe and
Mulde rivers, making contact with Soviet forces near the Elbe in late April. The US Third Army had fanned out to the east into western Czechoslovakia and southeast into eastern
Bavaria and northern Austria. By V-E Day, the US 12th Army Group was a force of four armies (First, Third, Ninth and
Fifteenth) that numbered over 1.3 million men.
Final moves by Western Allies General Eisenhower's Armies were facing resistance that varied from almost non-existent to fanatical as they advanced toward Berlin, which was located from their positions in early April 1945. Britain's
Prime Minister,
Winston Churchill, urged Eisenhower to continue the advance toward Berlin by the 21st Army Group, under the command of Montgomery with the intention of capturing the city. Even Patton agreed with Churchill that he should order the attack on the city since Montgomery's troops could reach Berlin within three days. The British and Americans contemplated an airborne operation before the attack. In Operation Eclipse, the
17th Airborne Division,
82nd Airborne Division, 101st Airborne Division, and a British brigade were to seize the
Tempelhof,
Rangsdorf,
Gatow,
Staaken, and
Oranienburg airfields. In Berlin, the
Reichsbanner resistance organization identified possible drop zones for Allied paratroopers and planned to guide them past German defenses into the city. After Bradley warned that capturing a city located in a region that the Soviets had already received at the
Yalta Conference might cost 100,000 casualties, by 15 April Eisenhower ordered all armies to halt when they reached the Elbe and Mulde Rivers, thus immobilizing these spearheads while the war continued for three more weeks. 21st Army Group was then instead ordered to move northeast toward Bremen and Hamburg. While the U.S. Ninth and First Armies held their ground from Magdeburg through Leipzig to western
Czechoslovakia, Eisenhower ordered three Allied field armies (1st French, and the U.S. Seventh and Third Armies) into southeastern Germany and Austria. Advancing from northern Italy, the British Eighth Army pushed to the borders of
Yugoslavia to defeat the remaining
Wehrmacht elements there. from the German Chief-of-Staff, General Alfred Jodl, who signed the first general
instrument of surrender at 0241 hours. General
Franz Böhme announced the unconditional surrender of German troops in Norway. Operations ceased at 23:01 hours Central European time (CET) on
8 May. On
that same day Field Marshal
Wilhelm Keitel, as head of
OKW and Jodl's superior, was brought to Marshal
Georgy Zhukov in
Karlshorst and signed another instrument of surrender that was essentially identical to that signed in Rheims with two minor additions requested by the Soviets. ==Casualties==