Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in , fighting on the eastern front was continuous. The Germans, who had been close to capturing the capital of Moscow in late , were pushed back over miles to west to the town of Rzhev. This attack was problematic for German morale but, by February , German troops had reorganised. They counterattacked and destroyed several Soviet divisions.
This counterattack was soon met with further counterattacks from the Soviets and then the Germans. On the 23 August , the Germans launched an offensive to seize the city of Stalingrad in south-west Russia. The battle was one of the largest and most brutal in history. It was also one of the only battles of the Second World War to feature hand-to-hand combat. The Germans first attempted to bomb Stalingrad into submission.
The city was reduced to rubble with air attacks by the Luftwaffe. German tanks followed the planes, reaching the outskirts of the city quickly. The German troops entered Stalingrad on the 12 September , advanced quickly and occupied two thirds of the city by the 30 September. Their rapid advance once again fooled them into thinking that the battle would be quick. The Soviets put up a strong resistance.
Having experienced losses against the Germans almost continuously for the previous year, the Soviet Army saw Stalingrad as an ideological and moral battle as well as a tactical one. In addition to continuous air bombing, fighting in the rubble of the city was characterised by hand-to-hand combat with daggers and bayonets, as each side ambushed the other under the cover of darkness.
By November , Marshal Georgy Zhukov , the Soviet general, had gathered over a million men with several tank armies. Zhukov encircled Axis troops in the north-west of the city. On 19 November , the Russians overwhelmed Romanian armies who were supporting the Germans in the north west of the city. The Germans reacted slowly, and quickly became encircled.
Despite General Paulus repeatedly requesting permission to surrender or retreat from Hitler, this was denied. The , German soldiers that were surrounded by the Soviet Army quickly ran out of ammunition and food in the midst of the Russian winter.
Of the 91, German troops that surrendered, just eventually returned to Germany. Most died from illness, starvation or exhaustion. It was a series of four offensives carried out by Allied troops in central Italy who was a key ally of Germany in an attempt to breakthrough the Winter Line and occupy Rome.
Monte Cassino was the mountain above the town of Cassino where the Germans had installed several defences in preparation for the Allied invasion.
An Abbey sat on top of the mountain. One of the primary routes to Rome ran through the town of Cassino at the bottom of the mountain. Other routes to Rome had become impassable due to flooding and the difficult terrain made worse by the winter weather. However, due to the German defences above, passing along the Monte Cassino route was impossible without first defeating the German troops on the mountain.
Allied troops landed in southern Italy in September , but only had limited progress due to the harsh winter and Axis defences. The first attack at Monte Cassino started on 17 January as British Empire, American and French troops fought uphill against the strategic German defences. The German defences were extremely well integrated into the mountainside, and, following large losses, the Allies pulled back on 11 February.
The Allies suspected that the Germans were using the Abbey which was situated at the top of a large hill and protected as neutral territory under the Concordat of as a military observation point. In response, the Allies bombed the Abbey, starting the second offensive of the battle, on 15 February Following the bombing, German troops used the ruins of the Abbey as a fortress and observation post.
The third attack was launched from the north on 15 March. After a large bombing campaign, Allied troops advanced through the town of Cassino. The defences were tough and both sides experienced heavy losses. The German parachute divisions held on to the Abbey. The Allies fell back, and planned Operation Diadem — the fourth and final battle. The battle involved attacks on four fronts, and took two months to get all the troops in place. The attack started on the evening of 11 May By 17 May, the Polish corps broke through the German defences.
On 4 June , the Allies captured Rome, the capital of Italy. Despite this success, the Battle had come at a cost. There were over 55, casualties for the Allied troops in comparison to 20, German casualties.
By the summer of , the Allies had enough coordinated strength to consider an invasion of France. This invasion became known as D-Day. On the evening of 5 June , under the cover of nightfall, British, French, American and Canadian troops started to cross the English Channel, landing in Normandy.
These troops were supported by paratroopers who were dropped behind enemy lines. The next morning, on 6 June , the attack began. With a huge concentration of troops defending the eastern front in the Soviet Union and the decoy measures implemented, resistance from the Germans was initially weaker than expected.
Despite this, the Allied troops experienced over 10, losses on the first day. Despite these losses, the Allied troops made small but significant progress. By 7 June , the Allies had managed to capture the naval port of Cherbourg. This acquisition allowed Allied troops to flood in to France, fighting their way slowly across France, pushing back the German troops. The Germans had, by this point, received reinforcements, but they were overwhelmed by the sheer number of Allied troops.
Fought between 22 June and 19 August, the attack resulted in huge casualties for German troops and destroyed their front line on the Eastern Front. This pushed the remaining German troops back into Poland.
They were being defeated and pushed back towards Germany, slowly, by both fronts. Following D-Day and the Invasion of Normandy, the Germans were fighting a defensive war on two fronts. At this stage in the war, the Germans did not have the resources to sustain this. They were quickly pushed back in France, and retreated into Germany. By March , the Allied troops had crossed the River Rhine.
On the Eastern Front, following the Battle of Stalingrad in and , the German Army had been pushed into retreat. By 17 January , Soviet troops had liberated Warsaw, the capital of Poland. On 27 January the Soviets liberated the Auschwitz Camp complex, which included Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi extermination camp.
On 16 April , the Soviet troops started the offensive to capture Berlin, the German capital. Led by Marshal Zhukov, who had successfully commanded the Battle of Stalingrad, Soviet troops encircled Berlin, and started their advance inward. On 30 April , Hitler took his own life in his bunker underneath the Reich chancellery. On 2 May, Berlin was surrendered to the Allies. The aim was to sow terror among the civilian population.
Hundreds were killed, buildings were flattened and the remaining population fled. Two days after the invasion, Britain and France declared war on Germany.
Two weeks later, Poland suffered a second invasion, this time from the Soviet Union in the east. It is not widely known but Polish casualties during the bombing of Warsaw by the Luftwaffe in were about the same as those suffered by the Germans in the British bombing of Dresden in , when up to 25, died. The German invasion of Poland heralded the start of one of the bloodiest occupations of the war, in which the Germans killed millions of Polish citizens.
After the failed uprising by Poland's underground Home Army against the German occupiers in Warsaw, in which more Poles were killed than Japanese during the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hitler gave orders for the Polish capital to be destroyed.
When the Red Army drove out the German occupiers from Warsaw in , Stalin installed a compliant communist regime in Poland, which endured until Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin agreed that German reparations to Poland should be made via the Soviet Union in the form of materials, infrastructure and food rather than cash. I would rather be frank with you, Mr. Nothing on earth will stop the Poles from taking some kind of revenge on the Germans after the Nazi collapse.
There will be some terrorism, probably short-lived, but it will be unavoidable. And I think this will be a sort of encouragement for all the Germans in Poland to go west, to Germany proper, where they belong. The Invasion of the Balkans. The Sicilian and Italian Campaigns, The North West Europe Campaign, The Liberation of the Netherlands.
0コメント