Western Civilization - History Of European Society

588 Chapter 29

break Leningrad. When the siege ended in early 1943,
half of the population of Leningrad had died.
The turning point of World War II in Europe came
in southern Russia. The Wehrmachthad already lost
nearly two million men on the eastern front before the
Red Army began to counterattack in the winter of
1942–43. A campaign on the Volga River at Stalingrad
was the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany, an
epic battle comparable to Verdun in the First World
War. The Red Army encircled a German army of
300,000 men at Stalingrad and relentlessly attacked in
horrifying conditions where temperatures reached mi-
nus forty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. When the Germans
gave up in February 1943, a veteran army that had sped
across Belgium and Holland was reduced to ninety-one
thousand starving, frostbitten prisoners of war, only six
thousand of whom eventually survived Russian impris-
onment. After the battle of Stalingrad, the Wehrmachtat-
tempted another offensive, the largest tank battle in
history—the battle of Kursk, a rail center south of
Moscow. This nine-day battle involved more than two
million combatants, five thousand planes, and six thou-
sand tanks. The Wehrmachtlost badly, as the Red Army
threw seemingly endless numbers of men and equip-
ment into the battle. Then began a long German re-
treat. The Russian army recaptured Smolensk in

September 1943, liberated Kiev in November, and

crossed the frontier into Poland in January 1944.

The Allies had long planned to open a western

front against Germany. Stalin pressed this policy to re-

duce the burden of the eastern front, where Russian

deaths had passed the ten million mark. The western

Allies responded with Operation Overlord, a plan to

invade northern France with a combined army of five

divisions (two British, two American, and one Cana-

dian), commanded by General Eisenhower. They pre-

pared elaborately, staging men and materiel in southern

England and conducting bombing raids over Germany.

The RAF struck Berlin with nine hundred tons of

bombs in March 1943, then concentrated on the indus-

trial Rhineland. The bombing of Essen cut the output

of the Krupp armaments complex by 65 percent.

The result was the largest amphibious invasion in

history, landing on the shores of Normandy on D-Day,

June 6, 1944 (see illustration 29.3). An armada of five

thousand ships landed 150,000 soldiers (plus thousands

of vehicles and tons of supplies) on the French coast. In

less than two weeks, these numbers reached nearly

500,000 soldiers and 90,000 vehicles. The Normandy

landings led to a rapid breakthrough by Allied tank

forces, and by midsummer Germany clearly had lost

the second battle of France, permitting armies of the

Illustration 29.3

D-Day.The turning point of World War II on the western

front came on June 6, 1944, when the Allies staged the greatest

amphibious landing in history, along the shores of northern

France. Landing craft such as the one shown in this photograph

put an army of more than 150,000 men ashore in the first day,

losing slightly more than 2,000 killed.