724 Chapter 27 War and Peace, 1941–1945
Germany Overwhelmed
By the time the Allies had taken Rome, the mighty
army needed to invade France had been collected in
England under Eisenhower’s command. On D-Day,
June 6, 1944, the assault forces stormed ashore at five
points along the coast of Normandy, supported by a
great armada and thousands of planes and paratroops.
Against fierce but ill-coordinated German resistance,
they established a beachhead: Within a few weeks a
million troops were on French soil. (See Re-Viewing
the Past, Saving Private Ryan, pp. 726–727.)
Thereafter victory was assured, though nearly a year
of hard fighting lay ahead. In August the American
Third Army under General George S. Patton, an eccen-
tric but brilliant field commander, erupted southward
into Brittany and then veered east toward Paris. Another
Allied army invaded France from the Mediterranean in
mid-August and advanced rapidly north. Free French
troops were given the honor of liberating Paris on
August 25. Belgium was cleared by British and
Canadian units a few days later. By mid-September the
Allies were fighting on the edge of Germany itself.
The front now stretched from the Netherlands
along the borders of Belgium, Luxembourg, and France
all the way to Switzerland. If the Allies had mounted a
massive assault at any one point, as the British comman-
der, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, urged, the
struggle might have been brought to a quick conclu-
sion. Although the two armies were roughly equal in
size, the Allies had complete control of the air and
twenty times as many tanks as the foe. The pressure of
the advancing Russians on the eastern front made it dif-
ficult for the Germans to reinforce their troops
in the west. But General Eisenhower believed a
concentrated attack was too risky. He prepared
instead for a general advance.
While he was regrouping, the Germans on
December 16 launched a counterattack,
planned by Hitler himself, against the Allied
center in the Ardennes Forest. The Germans
hoped to break through to the Belgian port of
Antwerp, thereby splitting the Allied armies in
two. The plan was foolhardy and therefore
unexpected, and it almost succeeded. The
Germans drove a salient (“the bulge”) about
fifty miles into Belgium. But once the element
of surprise had been overcome, their chance of
breaking through to the sea was lost.
Eisenhower concentrated first on preventing
them from broadening the break in his lines
and then on blunting the point of their
advance. By late January 1945 the old line had
been reestablished.
The Battle of the Bulge cost the United
States 77,000 casualties and delayed
Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky views emaciated bodies at Buchenwald,
Germany, one of several dozen Nazi concentration camps created to exterminate
Jews—and others whom the Nazis deemed “undesirable.”Eisenhower’s offensive, but it exhausted the
Germans’ last reserves. The Allies then pressed for-
ward to the Rhine, winning a bridgehead on the far
bank of the river on March 7. Thereafter, one
German city fell almost daily. With the Soviets racing
westward against crumbling resistance, the end
could not be long delayed. In April, American and
Soviet forces made contact at the Elbe River. A few
days later, with Soviet shells reducing his capital to
rubble, Hitler, by then probably insane, took his
own life in his Berlin air raid shelter. On May 8
Germany surrendered.
As the Americans drove swiftly forward in the late
stages of the war, they began to overrun Nazi concen-
tration camps where millions of Jews and others had
been murdered. The Americans were horrified by
what they discovered, but they should not have been
surprised. Word of this holocaust, in which 12 million
people (half of them Jews) were slaughtered, had
reached the United States much earlier. At first the
news had been dismissed as propaganda, then dis-
counted as grossly exaggerated. Hitler was known to
hate Jews and to have persecuted them, but that he
could order the murder of millions of innocent peo-
ple, even children, seemed beyond belief. By 1943,
however, the truth could not be denied.
Little could be done about those already in the
camps, but there were thousands of refugees in occu-
pied Europe who might have been spirited to safety.
President Roosevelt declined to make the effort; he
refused to bomb the Auschwitz death camp in Poland
or the rail lines used to bring victims to its gas cham-
bers on the grounds that the destruction of German