North-West Europe campaign (1944-5). This was fought across France, the Low Countries, and Germany, beginning with the invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944 and ending with the unconditional surrender of Germany on 7 May 1945. The Allied commanders were grimly aware that the Wehrmacht was a mighty engine of war, even at this late stage and after the appalling attrition of the eastern front, and the sum of their generalship was to so arrange matters that their immense material advantage (the German generals called it Materielschlacht) could be brought to bear, sparing themselves the human losses that would otherwise be the inescapable price of victory. Much criticism of the conduct of the campaign fails to bear in mind that the British were war-weary and at their manpower limit very soon after the breakout from Normandy, that the Americans were institutionally very weak at the junior infantry officer level, but above all that man-for-man and tank-for-tank, even reserve German units heavily diluted with non-Germans often beat the best the Allies had to throw at them. They were often better equipped and usually better trained, and they were directed by an officer corps that worshipped the military art and grimly obeyed to the bitter end the orders of a man many of them despised, simply because they had sworn an oath of loyalty to him.
Neither at the time, nor even in their memoirs did Eisenhower, Bradley, or Montgomery dwell upon this embarrassing fact, but it was certainly never far from the front of their minds throughout the campaign. There is no cheap way of defeating a courageous, skilled, and determined enemy, but insofar as it could be done, they did it. However, whenever they permitted themselves to believe that they had the enemy on the run, he turned and savaged them, on the defensive at Arnhem and, to the stupefaction of a supreme command enjoying not only total air superiority but also the advantage of what was by this time a steady stream of ULTRA decryption, on the offensive at the Bulge. It was akin to beating a venomous snake with a large stick, working up from the tail. At any time it might whip round and strike and the danger was not over until the head was finally immobilized and cut off.
There were also political and geopolitical constraints on the Allied commanders' freedom of operation. The French had to be treated with respect (no easy task in view of previous difficulties with de Gaulle) because, whatever their weakness at the moment, a strong and friendly France was the key to US and British hopes for a stable post-war Europe. Thus a largely symbolic diversion of resources to liberate the south of France (DRAGOON) had to be mounted, at the expense of the Italian campaign. And after the Forces Français de l'Intérieur had launched an assault on the remaining German occupiers in Paris, the 2nd (French) Armoured Division under Leclerc had to be diverted to make an emotive entry into their capital and prepare the way for de Gaulle to walk down the Champs-Elysées amid popular ecstasy.
The operational problems facing Eisenhower were seriously complicated by the fact that Montgomery and Patton were both forceful characters who hated each other, and that the former made no secret in public or in private of his belief that he should be the supreme commander. As late as the Bulge, he threw away the goodwill he had generated by promptly and efficiently coming to the assistance of Bradley with a bombastic claim to have directed the whole counter-attack and to make one more demand for overall command. Despite the tensions it would have caused within the alliance, there were times when he was close to dismissal. Patton, who already had been sacked once, at least restrained his public utterances. It is important to bear in mind that the indulgence shown to the French was also extended, for many good military as well as political reasons, to the British who by the end of the campaign were very much the junior partners.
In Eisenhower's favour was the fact that Hitler was by this time a physical ruin, poisoning himself with quack medicines, and that after the 20 July bomb plot his tenuous hold on reality slipped still further. Much is made of Hitler giving orders for the movement of non-existent units in 1945, but it should be borne in mind that at no time did he waver from his ferocious commitment to the war to the death with the Slavs on the eastern front. It is easy to deride his ‘no retreat’ policy in Normandy in the months after D-Day, and to observe that by the time the Falaise Gap was closed the Germans had lost 1, 500 tanks, 3, 500 guns, 20, 000 vehicles, and nearly 500, 000 men and with it all hope of stopping the Allies before the Rhine. But this is to overlook the fact that, like Rommel, he knew very well that the Allied advance had to be stopped at the water's edge. His only hope of personal salvation lay in buying a year while the Allies regrouped back in Britain, in order to turn his full attention back to the war that really mattered to him. He was right; even as the Allies' OVERLORD struggled, the Soviets' BAGRATION was tearing the heart out of the Wehrmacht.
Another point is that every day the likes of Rommel, Model, and Kesselring bought for their diseased overlord saw his other great obsession nearer to completion. The extermination camps were operating at full capacity during 1944-5 and for Hitler, this remained an important objective. However, the roots of continued German resistance were far more deep-seated and reflected, inter alia, a strong martial tradition, robust tactical leadership, training which (at least until mid-1944) was better than that of the Allies, and the recognition that if France was lost the next battle would be fought in Germany. Some of the blame must lie with the Allies' formula of unconditional surrender. The Germans, Nazis or not, knew very well what unconditional surrender to them had meant for other peoples, and could only assume the worst. US Treasury Secretary Morgenthau seriously proposed reducing Germany to a purely agrarian economy post-war, while the Soviets did, of course, do precisely that to the area they occupied. Cornered rats fight viciously.
This, then, was what Eisenhower and his subordinates had to deal with. The element of good luck came from the fact that like many gamblers, Hitler believed in doubling his bets. Thus in Normandy he sacrificed all hope of waging a fighting retreat across northern France, and at the Bulge he squandered the mobile reserves that might have made the taking of the Siegfried or the Rhine Lines very much more costly. This was seen very clearly at Arnhem, a mere 30 days after Falaise, where the grossly outnumbered Luftwaffe managed to regain a degree of temporary air parity; but it was even more tellingly shown in the miserable experience of the US First and Ninth armies in the Hürtgen Forest before the Ardennes offensive. WACHT AM RHEIN was a doomed enterprise even before the weather cleared and the ground-attack fighters came out in force. Although the Allies were surprised in the battle of the Bulge, in the end the attack told greatly to German disadvantage.
Early 1945 saw the battle for the Rhineland conclude with another stroke of good fortune when the 9th Armoured Division of the US First Army captured the almost intact Ludendorff railway bridge over the Rhine at Remagen. Before it fell to water and air attacks ten days later, several First Army divisions had made it across. The capture of the bridge resulted in the dismissal of Rundstedt as C-in-C West and his replacement with Kesselring, but this was just shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic. Between 22 and 26 March, all the Allied armies crossed the Rhine, involving the British, who had to cross in the north where it was a greater obstacle, in a set-piece assault combining large-scale amphibious and airborne operations.
The North-West Europe campaign, 1944-5 and (inset) the Ardennes campaign of December 1944 ('Battle of the Bulge'). For preceding and concurrent events -->see also -->Normandy campaign--> and -->eastern front-->.
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Eisenhower was concerned that the Germans planned an Alpine redoubt, and accordingly directed the US armies to strike deep into the mountains of southern Germany and Austria, which they did with comparative ease. The redoubt turned out to be a chimera, but at this stage he was rightly concerned that the meeting with the Red Army should be as carefully orchestrated as possible. His political masters had already defined zones of occupation and he knew that such glory as could be had in taking Berlin was going to be very dearly bought. And it was, by the Soviets.
By 1 April, Model's Army Group B had been surrounded when the pincers of the US Ninth and First Armies closed at Lippstadt. Three hundred thousand men surrendered and their commander shot himself. Hitler also shot himself as the Soviets fought their way into Berlin, a process completed by 2 May. Montgomery's Army Group reached Hamburg on the following day and between 4 and 5 May the surrender of German formations in the west was negotiated, Montgomery taking that of units in north-west Germany, Denmark, and Holland, while Dönitz surrendered what was left of German forces to Eisenhower at his HQ in Rheims on 7 May. The campaign and the European war officially ended at midnight on 8 May 1945.
— Peter Caddick-Adams/Richard Holmes
