d]"(R07\:B)GkQSX\_if{koshyMw/PICCHURCH.LBM June 6, 1944: D-Day Shortly after midnight on June 6, the Allied invasion of France began with paratroop landings to the east and west of the chosen invasion site -- the beaches of Normandy along the bay of the Seine. At first light, as the five thousand ships of the immense Allied fleet hove into view of the villages along the bay, the guns of the battleships opened up with a barrage of pounding artillery fire designed to stun and demoralize the German defenders of Hitler's Atlantic Wall. The squat landing craft, packed tight with Allied infantry, first touched French soil at 6:31a.m. -- one minute after H-Hour of D-Day. The Allied plan for D-Day called for landings by the U.S. 1st and 4th Infantry Divisions on the two westernmost beaches, code named Utah and Omaha, at 6:30 a.m., to be followed by two British and one Canadian division landing on the eastern beaches of Gold, Juno, and Sword an hour later. Due to a navigational error, the Utah forces came ashore a mile away from their designated landing site -- a mistake which turned out to be in their favor, as their new location was less heavily defended than the original target area. The soldiers at Utah made their landing with ease, taking only two hundred and fifty casualties during all of D-Day. The soldiers at Omaha weren't so fortunate. That beach had recently been reinforced with troops from the crack German 352nd division, and the pre-invasion bombardments hadn't done much to weaken the defenders. The Omaha forces also lost their amphibious tanks in the rough waters of the bay, leaving the infantry without armor support. Running undefended into a wall of machine gun and mortar fire, the invading soldiers were mowed down in staggering numbers. Before long, Omaha beach was carpeted with the bodies of the wounded, the dying, and the dead. By nine in the morning, the commander of the Omaha troops, General Omar Bradley, had nearly given up on taking the beach and was considering moving his forces to the east and landing them on the British beaches instead. But the strategic importance of Omaha was too great. Despite the terrible cost, Bradley determined to hang on. Slowly, by sheer force of numbers more than anything else, the Omaha troops wore down their German opponents. By one-thirty in the afternoon, the first soldiers finally made it off the beach and began tentatively pushing inland. At the end of the day, Omaha had been taken and held -- at a price of 2,500 men dead, wounded, or missing. To the east, the British and Canadian forces had landed to discover a situation midway between the easy walk on Utah and the unending bloody slaughter on Omaha. Members of the British 50th Infantry division on the western half of Gold beach met troops of the same 352nd German division that was wreaking havoc on Omaha, and fared much the same way, while the British forces on the eastern half of the same beach met little to no resistance and succeeded in making the only beachhead union of D-Day, moving swiftly east to link up with the Canadians. Those men, soldiers of the Canadian 3rd Infantry Division, had experienced a difficult landing thanks to especially rough currents and sharp reefs near their designated landing site Once ashore, they found a mix of conditions -- some sectors were heavily defended, while others were practically abandoned. The easternmost beach, Sword, was the landing site of the British 3rd Infantry. The troops at Sword worked with special determination to get well ashore and firmly dug in before the end of the day, for, although the beach defenses they faced were relatively light, they knew that the German counterattack would be coming soon. Their position as the beach farthest east undoubtedly meant that they would be the first targets of the German tank divisions that would soon be deployed against the invasion force. Shortly before the end of the day, the Sword troops made it far enough inland to relieve the hard-pressed British 6th Airborne, who had been valiantly holding off the German 21st Panzer Division from the heights of Bieville, near Caen. The timely relief of the paratroops stymied the German drive to the beach, and the 21st Panzers instead dug in to hold the town of Caen. By D-Day's end, the Allies had landed 152,000 troops and hundreds of tanks in Normandy. They had managed to unite only two of the beachheads -- Juno and Gold -- and bloody Omaha was still only lightly held. The important strategic city of Caen was still in German hands, as well. In fact, none of the Allies' D-Day objectives had been reached -- and yet, the landing was still a success. The invasion army was well ashore and moving inland, and the cost had been far lighter than expected. Even the most optimistic predictions had forecast at least 10,000 dead, while the actual total was only a quarter of that. The total casualties for the day were 12,000 wounded, missing, or dead, the vast majority of those on Omaha beach. Hitler's worst fear -- the Second Front -- had become a reality. /END /PICGACTPL.LBM June 13, 1944: "Vergeltungswaffen" Hitler's response to the Allied landings in France was to order the launching of the first of his "Vergeltungswaffen," or "Weapons of Vengeance" -- the V-1 rocket. Ramp-launched by a hydrogen peroxide catapult, the V-1 carried nearly one ton of explosives, and could travel about one hundred and fifty miles at an average speed of 350 to 400 miles per hour. The V-1 was more of a pilotless plane than a true rocket, 26 feet in length and with a 17-foot wingspan. Hitler had stockpiled over 12,000 of these "flying bombs" along the coastline of Western Europe, although by D-Day only seven of the planned sixty launching sites had been completed. Most of the V-1s that fell on London were launched from the Pas de Calais site -- over 8,000 of them before Calais was finally taken in the first week of September. Londoners called the V-1s "buzz bombs" for the noise they made while flying. When the noise ended, signaling that the engines had cut out, civilians on the ground knew they had only a few seconds at most to find cover before the bomb hit. This made the V-1 an effective weapon of terror as well as pure destruction. The Allied information services censored all reports of V-1 landings, to avoid giving Hitler information about the effect of his new weapons which he could use to improve his targeting. /END /PICGSOL2.LBM June 29: Cherbourg Struggling through the Normandy bocage country, the men of the U.S. VII Corps of the 4th Infantry Division under Lt. Col. J. Lawton "Lightning Joe" Collins managed to make it across the neck of the Cotentin Peninsula late in the evening of June 17. A number of German troops were trapped north of the line, and they promptly withdrew to the heavily defended port of Cherbourg on the peninsula's tip. By June 21 the Americans were within sight of Cherbourg's outer defenses. The German commander of Cherbourg was Lt. Gen. Karl Wilhelm von Schlieben, who had constructed a solid defensive semicircle of steel and concrete south of the port. His troops numbered 25,000, but were of poor quality and short on supplies. He requested permission from the Fuhrer to surrender, but was denied. After an off-shore artillery bombardment on June 22, the Americans advanced on June 23 and two days later were fighting within the city itself. The battle for Cherbourg lasted four days, and was a relatively easy victory for the Allies. The Germans had a victory of their own, however, for the Allies' main objective -- the capture of the port for the use of Allied supply ships -- had been stymied. As early as June 10 Von Runstedt had ordered the demolition of the port facilities, and by the time Cherbourg was taken they were completely unusable. The piers had been dynamited, the breakwaters breached, and the harbor mouth mined and blocked with scuttled ships. The beaches of Cherbourg were not opened for use by the Allies for nearly three weeks, and the piers were not repaired and functional until August 7. The last of the damage would not be repaired until the end of September. Yet by November it handled 14,000 tons of supplies each day, and eventually half of the American supplies used during the war in Western Europe would come in through Cherbourg's harbor. /END /PICROMM.LBM July 17, 1944: The End of Rommel By the middle of July, the Allied forces were almost ready to make their move to break out of the Normandy beachhead, at long last. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was well aware of the impending attack, and was making preparations to withstand it, but the fortunes of war turned against him. While being driven from the Caen area to his headquarters at La Roche-Guyon, his car was strafed by machine gun fire from a low-flying fighter-bomber piloted by South African air ace J.J. Le Roux, the top-scoring pilot in the Normandy area since D-Day. Rommel's driver was killed by the strafing, and the car went out of control and smashed into a tree. Rommel, thrown free of the vehicle, was severely injured and put out of action for the foreseeable future. Three months later, while still recuperating, he was implicated in the plot to assassinate Hitler and given a choice between committing suicide by poison, or being executed by treason. To spare his family the repercussions of a treason charge, Rommel took the poison. The career of one Germany's most brilliant commanders thus ended in disgrace and ignominy. The pilot who fired on Rommel's car was never aware of the identity of his victims. Eight weeks later, his plane would disappear over the English Channel on a flight back to England. /END /PICGLEADER.LBM July 20, 1944: A Narrow Escape for Hitler Hitler survived a number of assassination attempts during his reign, but only one attempt came close to succeeding, failing only due to bad luck, and the unwillingness of the assassin to die along with his target. For several months, a group of high Army officers had been plotting to kill Hitler and place Rommel in charge of the Reich in his stead. They had decided that a bomb would be the most effective way to accomplish their goal, and had made several previous attempts to detonate one in the presence of the Fuhrer. These attempts had all failed due to a combination of incomplete planning and bad luck. On July 20, one of the conspirators, Count von Stauffenberg, carried a briefcase loaded with explosives into the wooden hut at Hitler's headquarters in Rastenburg, where the Fuhrer was poring over a map of the Eastern Front, set it down under the table, and left again. When he was two and was satisfied that the dead was done. Assuming that his plan had succeeded, Von Stauffenberg hurried off to Berlin to call for the military takeover. But once there, he learned that although four of the officers in the hut had been killed, Hitler himself had only been wounded. Just before the bomb had exploded, one of the officers had pushed the briefcase off to one side so that the table over which Hitler was leaning had protected him from most of the blast. Although the conspirators attempted to arise and imprison the Gestapo and SS officers, with Hitler still alive, their efforts fell through. Over the next few months Hitler would respond to this attack with a wave of more than five thousand executions of conspirators and suspected conspirators, including Rommel himself. Before taking poison, one of the plotters, Major General Henning von Treschkow, declared: "God once promised Abraham to spare Sodom, should there be ten just men in the city. He will, I hope, spare Germany because of what we have done, and not destroy her." /END /PICUACTION3.LBM July 25, 1944: Breakout By the end of July, after two months of stagnation, limited progress, and endless frustration near Caen, the Allies were finally ready to make a major advance. Originally, the breakout had been planned for the British forces in the Caen area, where the terrain was much better suited for tanks, but with the fierce German resistance near that city the responsibility for the attack fell to the Americans by default. The American operation was code named COBRA, and was slated to take place on July 14 beginning with an attack south at the city of St.-Lo, to be followed a few days later by the British operation GOODWOOD, an attack south at the Caen/Falaise area. Cobra was briefly delayed by rain, but on July 17 St.-Lo was attacked and fell almost immediately, and after a week of fierce fighting the remaining German resistance broke and the Allied advance was underway. Cobra was originally conceived as a limited breakout, in support of the main British breakout near Caen. But Caen, a D-Day objective, was not taken until July 18, by which time hardly a single building was left standing in the city. The Germans were determined not to let the Allies get past Caen into the tank-friendly country beyond, and so withdrew many of their forces from western Normandy to bolster their lines around Caen. With Goodwood stalled out near Caen, and German resistance in the west collapsing, the "limited" American breakout quickly turned into a wholesale advance as the American tanks and forces roared south down the coast to Avranches and "turned the corner" into Brittany. The Allies were well off the beaches at last. /END /PICENGGUN.LBM Early August, 1944: Brittany After reaching Avranches in the Normandy breakout, the Americans crossed the Brittany peninsula in a week of easy going. They encountered almost no enemy forces, as all the German troops in the area had either been pulled east to stand against Montgomery near Caen or had retreated into the heavily defended port cities on the Brittany coast. The hope of the Allies was to gain a single undamaged port to use for their supply ships, but, as at Cherbourg, the German demolition teams were thorough. The largest port in Brittany was the city of Brest, a target of special interest to the Allies, but although the city was reached by August 6, it was not entered until a full six weeks later. By that time it had been wrecked as thoroughly as Cherbourg before it. Not a single Brittany port was taken intact by the Allies. /END /PICPANTHER.LBM August 15, 1944: Operation DRAGOON The Allied landings in the south of France, code named ANVIL originally but changed to DRAGOON for security reasons later on, began on August 15. Winston Churchill opposed the plan, preferring instead a wholesale strike through Italy into Austria, but Eisenhower was still trying to take a major French port intact and hoped that a strike in the weakly-defended south would supply his needs. The chosen attack site was a forty-five mile long stretch of beach on the French Riviera, near the town of St. Tropez. The commanders used every hard lesson learned at the Normandy beaches, and that, coupled with the poor quality of the German troops in the area and the excellent weather, resulted in a near textbook-perfect operation with very light casualties. Hitler made no attempt to maintain his hold on Southern France, and ordered a withdrawal from the area only one day after the landings. Despite the German attempt to retreat, most of their Nineteenth Army was easily captured, though some troops and the 11th Panzer Brigade escaped north and rejoined the rest of the German army. A total of 57,000 prisoners were taken, and the ports of southern France fell like ninepins. Toulon was taken a week ahead of schedule, and the major port of Marseilles fell a full month earlier than planned. The speed of the capture had given the German forces less time to sabotage the ports, and they were more quickly repaired than the ones to the north. The Marseilles port eventually shipped 18,000 tons of Allied supplies a day. After securing the south of France, the Dragoon forces drove hard up the Rhone Valley, covering five hundred miles in a single month, and linked up with the Normandy forces by September 11. /END /PICGERGUN.LBM August 21, 1944: The Falaise Pocket As Dragoon was picking up speed in the south, back in Normandy portions of the U.S. First and Third Armies were sweeping east, cutting underneath the bulk of the German Seventh Army while the Canadians and British distracted them from the north. The XV Corps of the U.S. Third Army moved up to the town of Argentan and stopped there on orders from Bradley. A few miles further north, the Canadians under General Crerar had pushed south to the town of Falaise, but been stopped there by the Germans. The bulk of the German Seventh Army was now trapped in a pocket, surrounded on three sides by Allied forces. The only way out was through the hole between the Canadians and the U.S., the so-called "Falaise Gap." The German commander, Kluge, ordered his troops to hold the gap open at all cost, and managed to pull out two-fifths of his army through the narrow escape route. But 60,000 German troops were trapped in the pocket when the gap was finally closed. On the sixteenth of August, Kluge wrote Hitler to request permission to withdraw. The next day he was replaced by Field Marshal Walter Model. On the eighteenth, Kluge again wrote a letter to Hitler, begging him to stop the war, and then took poison and ended his own life. /END /PICDEGA.LBM August 25: The Liberation of Paris By August 20, many Allied troops were across the Seine, and the German forces in Normandy were eliminated except for a few scattered pockets. The Allies were now within shouting distance of Paris, and a great controversy arose over what to do about the City of Lights. Eisenhower was strongly inclined to simply pass the city by, leaving it surrounded but in German hands. Strategically, Paris was of limited worth, and taking it would entail grueling street fighting and delay the main war effort. Furthermore, there was the distinct possibility that German reprisals would cause irreparable harm to the beautiful and historic city. But Eisenhower faced stiff pressure to liberate the city from the proclaimed leader of the Free French, Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle's primary motivation was political, as he wanted to be known as the liberator of Paris in order to secure his postwar political future, but he was also correct in believing that freeing Paris would be a great morale-builder for the troops and the people of the Allied countries in general. Though its worth as a strategic conquest was limited, the value of Paris as a symbol was incalculable. De Gaulle also threatened to send in the single French division currently fighting with the Allies -- the armored 2nd -- alone, regardless of the Supreme Commander's decision, but Eisenhower discounted the threat as a bluff, believing that the division was entirely reliant on American supplies to proceed. As it happened, the French had been quietly pilfering and stockpiling supplies for the past month just in case they were forced to march on Paris by themselves, but it turned out not to be necessary. Eisenhower buckled under the pressure and gave the go-ahead to liberate the city. The operation might well have turned into the tragedy for Paris that Eisenhower feared, if not for the German commander of the city. General Dietrich von Choltitz was a loyal officer, with a reputation as a destroyer of cities on the Eastern Front, and he was under direct orders from Hitler to ruin as much of Paris as possible before allowing the Allies to take it. For the first time in his life, von Choltitz disobeyed a direct order, and instead made arrangements with the Allies for the peaceful surrender of the city on August 25. Through an unexpected act of generosity, Paris was saved. The next day, Charles de Gaulle led a victory parade through the streets of the liberated French capital. /END /PICGACTION.LBM August 31, 1944: The Gothic Line In northern Italy, the Allies were being held off by the Germans, who were holding steady behind their concrete and steel fortifications of the Gothic Line. At the end of August, Canadian and British troops first penetrated this defensive barrier, while at the same time the Americans crossed the Arno River. By late September, Allied troops were pushing past the Gothic Line in increasing numbers, although the defenders of the fortifications would not be completely eradicated until the following spring. /END /PICCHURTANK.LBM September 4, 1944: Antwerp The Canadian forces had been moving east along the Channel coast since the breakout, liberating the port cities as the went. Early in September, they and the rest of the British army took the major Belgian port of Antwerp with surprisingly little difficulty, capturing the city almost intact, with only minor damage to the port facilities. Unfortunately the Allies still could not make good use of this windfall to shorten their supply lines, for the mouth of Antwerp's harbor was blocked by the islands of the Schelde Estuary, which were still in German hands, and the waters around them were choked with thousands of German mines. Although the Allies weren't aware of it at the time, the tenacious defenders of the Schelde islands were under orders to keep the Allies from using Antwerp as a supply port for as long as possible, in order to limit their ability to withstand the planned Winter Offensive. It took over a month before the islands and the waters around them had been cleared of resistance, and the Allied supply ships could begin unloading in Antwerp. /END /PICGACTPL.LBM September 7, 1944: "Vergeltungswaffen" Again In early September, angered by the taking of Antwerp, Hitler ordered another of his "Vengeance Weapons" unleashed -- the V-2 rocket. Unlike the V-1, the V-2 was a true liquid-propelled ballistic missile which could reach speeds of thousands of miles per hour and strike targets up to two hundred miles away. It carried a warhead of over one ton of high explosives. More than 4,300 V-2s were dropped on London, Antwerp, and other targets between September 1944 and the end of March 1945, when the last of the launching sites was taken. Unlike the V-1 flying bombs, which could be shot down, there was at that time no effective defense against the V-2's high trajectory and speed. As terror weapons, though, the V-2s were less effective than V-1s in that their approach was entirely silent -- without the distinctive "buzz" there was simply no time to panic. As tactical weapons the V-2s were also less dependable than the V-1s, more prone to malfunction and targeting problems. /END /PICRECGERM.LBM September 15, 1944: Over the Border In mid-September, troops of the U.S. V and VII Corps first reached and crossed the border into Germany. The advancing Allied line stretched from the city of Aachen to the border of Luxembourg, along the entire southwestern border of the Reich. Since D-Day, the Allies had landed about one million men in France, and experienced about 220,000 casualties. In the same time period, the Wehrmacht forces had been reduced by 500,000 troops. Belgium and Luxembourg were now completely free of German control, except for a thin strip of land along the German border. /END /PICMONTY.LBM September 17, 1944: Operation MARKET-GARDEN By mid-September, the Allies had made such speedy progress across France that Eisenhower considered it possible that the war might be ended before the year was up. In hopes of speeding this happy outcome, he approved a risky plan put forth by General Montgomery called Operation Market-Garden. The first stage, Market, involved airborne drops into Holland to take seven bridges. The paratroopers would then be met by an armored division driving up the Zuider Zee from the south. Next, the unified forces would move east, make an end-run around the fortified line of German defenses called the Western Wall, and then strike south to the Ruhr area, the heart of Germany's industrial strength. Eisenhower badly wanted Allied troops to make it east of the Rhine before the German forces could retrench, so he approved the plan. Little German resistance in the area was expected. Unfortunately, their expectations were incorrect. In fact, the Germans had tanks in place in the towns of Arnhem and Nijmegen. The paratroopers who dropped into the area found themselves being smashed by the German armor, and they failed to take and hold the critical bridges, all of which had to be secured for the plan to succeed. A few hours into the battle a copy of the Allied supply/reinforcement orders was found in a downed glider, allowing the Germans to anticipate the movement of the Allied forces and intercept their supply drops. The Allied armor coming up from the south was ambushed by German tanks and failed to link up with the paratroopers. The operation ended in a total loss for the Allies, with 17,000 casualties, and dashed any hope for a quick end to the war in 1944. /END /PICSHERMAN.LBM The Sherman Tank The American Sherman Tank, in all of its varied incarnations, was the backbone of the Allied armored forces. The original Sherman, the M4A1, was first produced in February of 1942 by the Lima Locomotive Company. It weighed thirty tons, carried a five-man crew, was powered by a 400-hp engine that could propel it at a top speed of 25 miles per hour, and was armed with one 75 mm M3 gun and three machine guns. Two inches of armor plate protected the tank's nose, while the sides and back had an inch and a half of steel. The Sherman underwent continuous adaptation and development as the war progressed. The British converted the basic Sherman into the Sherman VC Firefly, with a longer range and somewhat better guns. Later, the American engineers experimented with different engines, new suspension, better turrets, and numerous other advances. The Shermans were also turned into experimental tanks, or "Funnies," many of which saw use on D-Day: the amphibious "Duplex Drive" tanks, "Crabs" that could detonate mines, flame-thrower tanks, and several other unusual and innovative designs. /END /PICKTIGER.LBM The Tiger Tank At the time of its introduction, in 1942, the German Tiger Tank was the most powerfully armed and well-defended tank in the world, and symbolic of the perceived German superiority in the technology of warfare. It weighed 54 tons and carried a crew of five. Although it was a trifle slower than the Sherman and had a shorter range thanks to its great weight, it carried an 88 mm main gun and had more than four inches of armor plating on its front and turret. Even its vulnerable belly was covered in a solid inch of steel. The Tiger tanks were intended to be distributed throughout the German forces, but in reality they were often snapped up by the privileged Waffen SS. The tank's main gun could pierce the front armor of the best Allied tank of the time, and its thick hull could withstand nearly any hit. In one battle in July of 1944, a single Tiger knocked out 25 British armored vehicles. By then, however, the Allies had begun to put larger guns on their tanks, and the Tiger's invulnerability became a casualty of the improved weapons. /END /PICDEGA.LBM CHARLES DE GAULLE Known as "The Big Asparagus" for his imposing height and his lanky frame, De Gaulle was a French statesman and general who opposed Petain's 1940 armistice with Germany and fled to Britain, where he became the organizer of the Free French forces. He was instrumental in encouraging the resistance of several French colonies to rule by the German-controlled Vichy government, and in fostering French resistance to Nazi rule everywhere. De Gaulle encouraged Eisenhower to liberate Paris when the Supreme Commander was tempted to pass the city by for strategic and humanitarian reasons. The successful liberation of the City of Lights ensured De Gaulle's political future in France. A month after he led the victory parade down the Champs Elysees, De Gaulle's organization was recognized as the legitimate government of France by the USA, the UK, and the USSR. /END /PICMONTY.LBM BERNARD LAW MONTGOMERY "Monty," as he was known to his troops and the British public, was one of the most controversy-inspiring generals of the war in Western Europe. A commander of the Old School, he relied heavily on careful and thoughtful planning, and rarely took daring action His cautious style and abrasive, arrogant manner caused friction in the upper levels of the Allied Supreme Command, but he was beloved by his men and revered by the British populace in general. The jaunty beret he wore everywhere became his trademark, much as Douglas MacArthur's corncob pipe became for him. Montgomery got his first battle experience in World War I, but made his reputation in the sands of North Africa during WWII when he took command of the British 8th and decisively defeated the Afrika Korps, commanded by the Desert Fox himself, Erwin Rommel. His victory over Rommel at El Alamein was followed by a string of lesser successes as he pursued Rommel's forces across Libya and Tunisia. The defeat of the Desert Fox made him a national hero in Britain. After the conclusion of the North African campaign, Montgomery commanded the 8th Army in the invasion of Sicily and Italy, and then became commander of the all the ground forces for the Normandy landing. /END /PICPATTON2.LBM GEORGE S. PATTON Patton, born into a prominent military family in Virginia, was fascinated by warfare from an early age. More than any other Allied general of World War II, Patton was in love with warfare to an almost extreme level, and actively enjoyed combat. This love was reflected in his bold and aggressive style of leadership which made him the only U.S. general feared by the Germans. "Old Blood and Guts," as he was appropriately nicknamed, was as much a showman as a soldier, as fond of grandstanding as his British counterpart, Montgomery. Instead of a hat, though, Patton's trademark was a pair of ivory-handled revolvers he wore slung on his hips at all times, as if he hoped someone would challenge him to a shoot-out in true Wild West fashion. As would seem inevitable for two commanders with similarly flamboyant personal styles yet widely divergent command styles, Patton and Montgomery despised each other. Patton's aggressive manner almost cost him his position when, while visiting wounded men in a field hospital, he threw a temper tantrum and slapped a soldier suffering from combat fatigue, which brought him a torrent of unfavorable public opinion. He was also known for condoning the killing of German prisoners of war, and attempting to cover up such activities in his own command. His hard-driving style and outstanding ability on the field of combat were invaluable to Eisenhower, however, and Patton's forces played pivotal roles in the Normandy breakout and the Battle of the Bulge. And, like Montgomery, Patton inspired almost fanatical loyalty in his troops. /END /PICEISENH.LBM DWIGHT DAVID EISENHOWER Ironically, the man who became the Supreme Commander of the Allied war effort in Western Europe had never seen front-line combat duty himself. Born into a devout and impoverished family in the American Midwest, he attended West Point as a means of gaining a college education. At West Point he quickly distinguished himself as a cadet with exceptional leadership qualities. During World War I, Eisenhower applied for an overseas combat position but was instead assigned to several training camps where he refined and polished his abilities at organizing and leading men. After the war, he was admitted to the Command and General Staff School, from which he graduated first in his class and was assigned to a wide variety of prestigious staff positions. The outbreak of World War II catapulted "Ike's" career into high gear, as he served first as assistant to U.S. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall , then as commander of the Allied invasions of North Africa and Italy. Late in 1943, he was named as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, and given the successful invasion of France as his objective. While Eisenhower was certainly an able military commander, his greatest strength and the most important asset he brought to the Allied war effort was his ability to handle men, particularly strong-willed, often difficult men such as George Patton and Bernard Montgomery. The British and American forces, though united in opposition to Hitler and Mussolini, were not at all united in many of their other goals or their ideas of how best to accomplish them. It was Eisenhower's task to keep everyone focused on the job at hand, and decide how best to successfully complete that endeavor. His greatest gifts were as a planner, a conciliator, and a compromiser, not as a fighter -- for that, he had men like Patton, Montgomery, and Bradley. /END /PICROMM.LBM ERWIN ROMMEL Erwin Rommel was probably the canniest and most able of all of Hitler's generals. He had been an officer in the German army in World War I, where he served with distinction, and in between the wars had held a post as an instructor at a war college. Rommel was one of the first to see the possibilities inherent in the emergence of the tank as a primary weapon of war. At first, Rommel greatly admired Hitler, speaking of his "genius," but later on in the war, after seeing how Hitler's policies were bringing about the ruin of Germany, he became disillusioned with the Fuhrer. His first command came when he was given control over an armored unit during the invasion of France. In the following year he was sent to North Africa, where he was given command over Germany's Afrika Korps. Over the next two years he achieved such success that he was given the nickname "The Desert Fox." The string of victories came to an end in 1943 when, outnumbered and critically short on supplies , he was decisively defeated by Montgomery at El Alamein. Rommel was then sent to fortify the Atlantic Wall against a cross-channel invasion by the Allies, an assignment which he completed to the best of his considerable ability although he considered it a worthless endeavor. When the Allies successfully invaded anyway, Rommel knew the war was hopeless and suggested to Hitler that he consider negotiating for peace, but was ignored. /END /PICGACTION.LBM December 16, 1944 -- January 16, 1945: The Battle of the Bulge The Ardennes Counteroffensive, or "The Battle of the Bulge" as it is more commonly known, began as an idea in the mind of Hitler in September of 1944. Throwing standard military thinking to the winds, Hitler decided that, rather than continue to use up his forces in doomed defensive stands, he would instead launch a bold attack on the Allies, to be executed at a totally unexpected place and time. The place was the lightly defended forest of Ardennes, close to the intersection of the borders of France, Belgium, and Germany, and the time was in the heart of the winter. Hitler spent the three months before his planned date of attack building up thirty new divisions almost from scratch, scraping the bottom of Germany's manpower barrel to make up the required number of troops. He then sent them out with orders to penetrate the Allied line in the Ardennes, proceed west to the Meuse river, and then move north to recapture Antwerp. If successful, the move would not only deny Antwerp to the Allies but would split the British and American forces. Hitler then hoped to fall on the British troops and destroy them, then force a demoralized United States into a negotiated peace. At first, the attack appeared to be a great success. The weak Allied line at the Ardennes was penetrated with ease, and the German tanks rolled on into Belgium as the Allied forces struggled just to maintain some kind of order in their retreat. Within a week, though, the Allied commanders had recovered from their shock and the Allied line stiffened. On Christmas day the American troops stopped the German drive altogether, with the leading German units still four miles from the banks of the Meuse. The Allied commanders had decided to let the Germans push on into the "Bulge," as the area under the enemy's control was called, and then cut the bulge off at the neck, trapping and destroying the advancing German units. With the halves of the pincer closing tight around the neck of the bulge and all hopes of any further advancement fading, Hitler reluctantly called for a withdrawal on January 8. By January 16, the Allied line had been restored to its original position, and the Battle of the Bulge was at an end. /END /PICSHERMAN.LBM February 4, 1945: The Siegfried Line Since the summer of 1944, Hitler had lavished men and resources on building up the Siegfried line, Germany's "Western Wall" of fortifications and defenses. The Fuhrer had even recalled Field Marshal Gerd von Runstedt from the retirement which Hitler had forced upon him only a few months earlier and made him responsible for Germany's defenses in the West, hoping that the presence of the old and respected commander would shore of the morale of the troops. He had expended no such effort on building up defenses for his eastern border, where the Red Army was now sweeping forward in an inexorable tide. Early in February, on their way to the Rhine, the Allies encountered the Siegfried Line defenses. They made their first penetration of the outlying fortifications on February 4, but would continue to struggle to get past the rest of the barriers for the next week. By mid-February, the Siegfried Line was leaking like a sieve, and Allied forces were on the banks of the Rhine. /END