1096 Ch. 26 • World War II
U.S. troops wading ashore at Utah Beach, Normandy, June 6, 1944 after the firstbloody assault.
bouts with illness. Now, although Germany’s collapse seemed imminent, he
again seemed confident, telling Albert Speer in November 1944, “1 haven’t
the slightest intention of surrendering. Besides, November has always been
my lucky month.” In December, Hitler ordered a massive counterattack in
the hills and forests of the Ardennes in Belgium and Luxembourg, with the
goal of pushing rapidly toward the Belgian river port of Antwerp. After
retreating forty-five miles, the U.S. army pushed the Germans back in the
Battle of the Bulge.
As the Nazi army retreated in northern Italy, the Red Army approached
Germany from the east. On every front, Allied troops increasingly found that
their enemies turned out to be boys and older men who had been rushed to
the front with virtually no training. German cities burned, notably Dresden,
which American planes fire-bombed early in 1945. About 50,000 residents
of Berlin died in Allied air attacks. In 1993, about one unexploded World
War II bomb was still being discovered every day in Berlin.
Hitler, expressing confidence that the Big Three alliance would break up,
held out hope for Germany’s newly developed weapons, in which he had
earlier expressed no interest: the deadly V-l jet-propelled “flying bomb”
could strike targets from 3,000 feet at speeds of 470 miles per hour; the ter
rifying V-2 rocket could fly faster than the speed of sound. Launched from
France, the first V-l struck London on June 12, 1944, doing considerable