By Patrick Allitt, Emory University
The second major front in WWII, the invasion of Europe, finally began in June 1944—D-Day. The European war then lasted another 11 months. Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of this invasion force, decided that they would attack Normandy, which required a longer sea crossing but raised the possibility of being able to surprise the adversary.
Normandy: A Surprise Invasion
Hitler didn’t know that the Allies were going to land at Normandy until it actually happened.
The night before the invasion began, parachute troops were dropped behind enemy lines and destroyed crucial bridges so that the Germans couldn’t rush tank defenders to the support of the beaches, and so that the German defenders of the beaches were cut off from reinforcement from behind.
Reconquering France
A heavy aerial and naval bombardment of the coastal forts then took place, after which landing craft were launched to bring infantry troops in to attack the beaches directly. Despite the preparation of the bombardment, though, the landing on many of the beaches was extremely difficult and treacherous, particularly at one of the beaches code-named Omaha.
As soon as they’d landed and secured the beaches in Normandy, the Allies began a rapid build-up of men and machinery and equipment, a strong beachhead, after which, they then broke out into France itself, and in that fall began to reconquer France and then move into the Netherlands and Belgium, to cross the river Rhine and to attack Germany itself.
This is a transcript from the video series A History of the United States, 2nd Edition. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
The Battle of the Bulge
That winter, the American advance was checked in the Ardennes Mountains, in southern Belgium. It’s an event we now remember as the battle of the Bulge. The Germans fought with very great tenacity everywhere.
It must’ve been clear by the middle or by the summer or the fall of 1944 that Germany was going to lose the war, but one thing you have to take seriously in studying it is the incredible loyalty of the German people to Hitler. He was a widely loved leader for whom literally millions of people laid down their lives.
Even when defeat seemed certain, the German armies continued to fight for him very tenaciously, so that these battles in France and the Netherlands and Germany were extremely difficult and costly to the Allied armies.
Hitler’s Trojan Horse Ploy
At the battle of the Bulge, the battle of the Ardennes Forest in the winter of 1944–1945, Hitler experimented with a ploy like the old Trojan horse. He got groups of German soldiers who could speak English, dressed them up in U.S. military combat fatigues over their German uniforms, and sent them through the lines in captured U.S. jeeps.
The idea was that they’d go into American army encampments and sow misinformation, confuse the Allies about what was actually happening. Most of them succeeded in these missions and got back safely, having confused the Americans about exactly what was going on. Some of them were captured. But even they, because they’d been misinformed by their own officers, then misinformed the Americans about what was happening on their side of the lines.
American Casualties
Now, one can imagine that the idea that Germans were coming in disguised as Americans led to an intense fear on the part of the American troops, too.
There was a moment of desperate hard fighting in the snow, the mid-winter hills of Belgium. Between mid-December and mid-January, the Americans suffered 19,000 combat deaths, and another 15,000 of their men taken prisoner. It was really the most jarring reversal that the American army suffered after D-Day.
American Advantage
However, the Germans couldn’t maintain their pressure on the American forces, particularly once the weather had improved and brought Allied aircraft back into play. By D-Day, the Americans had almost complete air superiority, which gave them a decisive advantage in the fighting between D-Day and the final surrender of the Germans the next year.
As the American armies were moving eastward through France—the Low Countries, and Germany—the Russian armies, having finally broken the power of German resistance, were moving westward through Eastern Europe, retaking parts of the Ukraine and Russia that they had lost—then Poland, East Germany, Austria, Hungary, and so on.
Germans Surrender
Hitler himself committed suicide on April 30, 1945, in his bunker in Berlin. Armies were closing in on both sides. By then, the Russian tanks were already in the suburbs of Berlin, and finally, he’d come to terms with the fact that Germany was defeated.
His successor, Admiral Doenitz, surrendered unconditionally a week later.
Stalin’s Steadfastness
Hitler, Stalin, and Churchill met at Yalta in the Crimea to decide the disposition of the postwar world. Now, Stalin was determined not to relinquish his grip on Eastern Europe. Having reclaimed them from Hitler, he was determined that one way or another, he was going to hold onto them, not surprisingly, because twice in the last 25 years, Russia had been invaded by Germany.
Stalin wanted to make sure that it wasn’t going to happen again, that he’d have either direct or close indirect control over Eastern Europe. His armies, then, having seized them from the Germans, were determined to stay.
As we know, in the event, they did stay, right up until the end of the 1980s. Stalin was very embittered against Churchill and Roosevelt for what he regarded as their unpardonable slowness to launch the second front, to get the invasion of Europe started.
Common Questions about the European Theater of World War II
The Allies attacked Normandy, a heavy aerial and naval bombardment of the coastal forts then took place. They then broke out into France itself, and in that fall began to reconquer France and then move into the Netherlands and Belgium, to cross the river Rhine and to attack Germany itself.
Hitler got German soldiers dressed as US soldiers and had them go into American army encampments to sow misinformation, and confuse the Allies about what was actually happening.
Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945, in his bunker in Berlin. The Russian tanks were already in the suburbs of Berlin, and finally, it was well known that Germany was defeated. Hitler’s successor, Admiral Doenitz, surrendered unconditionally a week later.
