Western Front (World War II)

During World War II, the Western Front was the theater of fighting west of Germany, encompassing the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Denmark.

1939 – 1941
Fighting on the Western Front was preceded by the Phony War. Fighting began with Operation Weserübung, the German invasion of Denmark and Norway, in April, 1940. The next month, the Germans launched the Battle of France. The Western Allies &mdash; primarily the French and British &mdash; soon collapsed under the onslaught of the German blitzkrieg. The British escaped at Dunkirk, while the French Army surrendered with 90,000 dead and 200,000 wounded. Fighting along the Front ended, and the German army began preparations to invade England.

Following the Luftwaffe’s defeat in the Battle of Britain, the invasion of England was cancelled. While the majority of the German army was mustered for the invasion of the Soviet Union, construction began on the Atlantic Wall &mdash; a series of defensive fortifications along the French coast of the English channel. These were built in anticipation of a cross-channel British invasion of France.

1942 – 1943
Because of the massive logistical obstacles a cross-channel invasion would face, Allied high command decided to conduct a practice attack against the French coast. On August 19, 1942, the Allies began the Dieppe Raid, an attack on Dieppe. Most of the troops were Canadian, with an American and some British contingents. The raid was a disaster, and almost two-thirds of the attacking force became casualties. However, much was learned as a result of the operation &mdash; these lessons would be put to good use later in subsequent invasions.

For almost two years, there was no land-fighting on the Western Front with the exception of commando raids and the guerrilla actions of the resistance aided by the SOE and OSS. However, in the meantime, the Allies took the war to Germany, with a strategic bombing campaign the US Eighth Air Force bombing Germany by day and the RAF Bomber Command bombing by night.

1944: Liberation of most of France and Belgium


On June 6, 1944, the Allies began Operation Overlord (also known as "D-Day") &mdash; the long-awaited liberation of France. The deception operation had the Germans convinced that the invasion would occur at the Pas-de-Calais, while the real target was Normandy. Following two months of slow fighting in hedgerow country, Operation Cobra allowed the Americans to break out at the western end of the lodgement. Soon after, the Allies were racing across France. They circled around and trapped 250,000 Germans in the Falaise pocket. As so often happened on the Eastern Front Hitler refused to allow a strategic withdrawal until it was too late. 100,000 Germans managed to escape through the Falaise Gap but they left behind most of their equipment and 150,000 were taken prisoner. On August 15, in an effort to aid their operations in Normandy, the Allies launched Operation Dragoon &mdash; the invasion of Southern France between Toulon and Cannes. The Allies rapidly consolidated this beachhead and liberated southern France in two weeks, their advance only slowing down as they encountered regrouped and entrenched German troops in the Vosges Mountains.

The Germans were now faced by three powerful Allied army groups, In the North British 21st Army Group commanded by Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery, In the middle the American 12th Army Group commanded by General Omar Bradley and in the South the US 6th Army Group commanded by Lieutenant General Jacob L. Devers. They were all under the command of the Supreme Allied Commander (American) General Dwight D. Eisenhower at SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Forces).

Under the onslaught in both the North and South of France, the German Army fell back. The French Resistance organised a general uprising and the liberation of Paris took place on August 25 when general Dietrich von Choltitz surrendered ignoring orders from Hitler that Paris should be held to the last and to destroy the city.

The liberation of northern France and the Benelux countries was of special significance for the inhabitants of London and the south east of England, because it denied the Germans launch zones for their mobile V-1 and V-2 Vergeltungswaffen (reprisal weapons).

Unfortunately for the Allies, the Germans took special care to thoroughly wreck all port facilities before the Allies could capture them. As the Allies advanced across France, their supply lines stretched to the breaking point. The Red Ball Express, the allied trucking effort, was simply unable to transport enough supplies from the port facilities in Normandy all the way to the front lines, which by September, were close to the German border.

The Allies had been arguing about whether to advance on a broad-front or a narrow-front from before D-Day. If the British had broken out of the Normandy bridge-head around Caen when they launched Operation Goodwood and pushed along the coast, facts on the ground might have turned the argument in favour of a narrow front. But as the breakout took place during Operation Cobra at the western end of the bridge-head and as the U.S. armies swung east they rapidly fanned out into a broad front. As this was the strategy favoured by supreme Allied commander Eisenhower and most of the rest of the American high command this was the strategy which was adopted.

Market-Garden
The British Field-Marshal Montgomery persuaded Allied High Command to launch a bold attack, Operation Market Garden which he hoped would get the Allies across the Rhine and create the narrow-front he favoured. Paratroopers would fly in from England and take bridges over the main rivers of the German-occupied Netherlands. British XXX (30) Corps would punch through the German lines and link up with the paratroopers. If all went well, the Allies would capture the port facilities in Antwerp and advance into Germany without any remaining major obstacles. British XXX Corps was able to link up with six of the seven paratrooper-held bridges, but was unable to link up with the troops holding the bridge over the Rhine at Arnhem. The result was the destruction of the British 1st Airborne Division. These events were summarised by Lt Gen. Frederick Browning as "a bridge too far". The offensive ended with Arnhem in German hands and the Allies holding an extended salient from the Belgian border to the area between Nijmegen and Arnhem.

Siegfried Line and eastern France
Fighting on the Western front seemed to stabilize, and the Allied advance stalled in front of the Siegfried Line (Westwall) and the southern reaches of the Rhine. Starting in early September, the Americans began slow and bloody fighting through the Hurtgen Forest ("Passchendaele with tree bursts" -- Hemingway) to breach the Line.

The port of Antwerp was liberated on September 4 by British 11th Armoured Division. However, it lay at the end of a long Scheldt Estuary, and so it could not be used until its approaches were clear of heavily fortified German positions. The Breskens pocket on the southern bank of the Scheldt was cleared with heavy casualties by Canadian and Polish forces in Operation Switchback, during the Battle of the Scheldt. This was followed by a tedious campaign to clear a peninsula dominating the estuary, and finally, the amphibious assault on Walcheren Island in November. The campaign to clear the Scheldt Estuary was a decisive victory for the Canadian First Army and the Allies, as it allowed greatly improved delivery of supplies directly from the port of Antwerp, which was far closer to the front than the beaches of Normandy.

In October the Americans decided that they could not just invest Aachen and let it fall in a slow siege, because it threatened the flanks of the U.S. Ninth Army. As it was the first major German city to face invasion, Hitler ordered that the city be held at all costs. In the resulting battle of Aachen, after a very hard fight, the city was taken, at a cost of 5,000 casualties on both sides, with an additional 5,600 prisoners on the German side.

South of the Ardennes, U.S. forces fought from September until mid-December to push the Germans out of Lorraine and behind the Siegfried Line. The crossing of the Moselle River and the capture of the fortress of Metz proved difficult for the U.S. troops in the face of German reinforcements, supply shortages, and unfavorable weather. During September and October, the Allied 6th Army Group (U.S. Seventh Army and French First Army) fought a difficult campaign through the Vosges Mountains that was marked by dogged German resistance and slow advances. In November, however, the German front snapped under the pressure, resulting in sudden Allied advances that liberated Belfort, Mulhouse, and Strasbourg, and placed Allied forces along the Rhine River. The Germans managed to hold a large bridgehead (Colmar Pocket) on the western bank of the Rhine centered around the city of Colmar.

Battle of the Bulge
The Germans had been preparing a massive counter-attack in the West since the Allied breakout from Normandy. The plan called Wacht am Rhein ("Watch on the Rhine") was to attack through the Ardennes and swing North. The attack started on December 16 in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge. Defending the Ardennes were troops of the U.S. First Army. After initial successes in bad weather, which gave them cover from the Allied air forces, the Germans' vanguard almost reach the Meuse River. the Germans were eventually pushed back to their starting points by January 15, 1945.

1945: The Battle for Alsace
The Germans launched a second, smaller offensive (Nordwind) into Alsace on New Year's Day, 1945. Aiming to recapture Strasbourg, the Germans attacked the 6th Army Group at multiple points. Because Allied lines had become severely stretched in response to the crisis in the Ardennes, holding and throwing back the Nordwind offensive was a costly affair that lasted almost four weeks. The culmination of Allied counter-attacks restored the front line to the area of the German border and collapsed the Colmar Pocket.

Invasion of Germany
The pincer movement of the Canadian First Army in Operation Veritable advancing from Nijmegen area of the Netherlands and the U.S. Ninth Army crossing the Rur (Roer) in Operation Grenade was planned to start on February 8 1945, but it was delayed by two weeks when the Germans flooded the river valley by destroying the dam gates upstream. During the two weeks that the river was flooded Hitler would not allow Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt to withdraw East behind the Rhine arguing that it would only delay the inevitable fight. Hitler ordered him to fight where his forces stood.

By the time the water had subsided and the U.S. Ninth Army was able to cross the Roer on February 23, other Allied forces were also close to the Rhine's west bank. Rundstedt's divisions which had remained on the west bank of the Rhine were cut to pieces in the battle of the Rhineland and 290,000 men were taken prisoner.

The crossing of the Rhine was achieved at four points: One was an opportunity taken by U.S. forces when the Germans failed to blow up the Ludendorff bridge at Remagen, one crossing was a hasty assault, and two crossings were planned.
 * General Omar Bradley's US forces aggressive pursuit of the disintegrating German troops resulted in the capture of the Ludendorff bridge across the Rhine River at Remagen by the U.S. First Army. Bradley and his subordinates quickly exploited the crossing made on March 7 and expanded the bridgehead into a full scale crossing.
 * Bradley told General Patton whose U.S. Third Army had been fighting through the Palatinate, to "take the Rhine on the run". The Third Army did just that on the night of March 22 crossing the river with a hasty assault south of Mainz at Oppenheim.
 * In the North Operation Plunder was the crossing of the Rhine river at Rees and Wesel by the British 21st Army Group on the night of March 23. It included the largest airborne operation in history codenamed Operation Varsity. At the point the British crossed the Rhine, it is twice as wide, with a far higher volume of water, than the points where the Americans crossed and Montgomery decided it could only be crossed safely with a carefully planned operation.
 * In the Allied 6th Army Group area, the U.S. Seventh Army assaulted across the Rhine in the area between Mannheim and Worms on March 26. A fifth crossing on a much smaller scale was later achieved by the French First Army at Speyer.

Once the Allies had crossed the Rhine, the British fanned out Northeast towards Hamburg crossing the river Elbe and on towards Denmark and the Baltic. The U.S. Ninth Army, which had remained under British command since the battle of the Bulge went south as the northern pincer of the Ruhr encirclement. British and Canadian paratroopers reached the Baltic city of Wismar just ahead of Soviet forces on May 2.

The U.S. 12th Army Group fanned out, the First Army went north as the southern pincer of the Ruhr encirclement. On April 4 the encirclement was completed and the Ninth Army reverted to the command of Bradley's 12th Army Group. German Army Group B commanded by Field Marshal Walther Model was trapped in the Ruhr Pocket and 300,000 soldiers became POWs. The Ninth and First American armies then turned east and pushed to the Elbe River by mid-April. During the push east, the cities of Frankfurt am Main, Kassel, Magdeburg, Halle, and Leipzig were strongly defended by ad hoc German garrisons made up of regular troops, Flak units, Volkssturm, and armed Nazi Party auxiliaries. Generals Eisenhower and Bradley concluded that pushing beyond the Elbe made no sense since eastern Germany was destined in any case to be occupied by the Red Army. The Ninth and First Armies stopped along the Elbe and Mulde Rivers, making contact with Soviet forces near the River Elbe in late April. U.S. Third Army had fanned out to the East into western Czechoslovakia, and Southeast into eastern Bavaria and northern Austria. By V-E Day, the U.S. 12th Army Group was a force of four armies (First, Third, Ninth, and Fifteenth) that numbered over 1.3 million men.

Allied victory in Europe
The U.S. 6th Army Group fanned out to the Southwest passing to the east of Switzerland through Bavaria into Austria and North Italy. The Black Forest and Baden were overrun by the French First Army. Determined stands were made in April by German forces at Heilbronn, Nuremburg, and Munich but were overcome after battles that lasted several days. Elements of the US 3rd Infantry Division were the first Allied troops to arrive at Berchtesgaden, which they secured along with the Berghof (Hitler's Alpine residence). German Army Group G surrendered to U.S. forces at Haar, in Bavaria, Germany on May 5, 1945. Field Marshal Montgomery took the German military surrender of all German forces in Holland, Northwest Germany and Denmark on Lüneburg Heath an area between the cities of Hamburg, Hanover and Bremen, on the May 4 1945. As the operational commander of some of these forces was Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, the new Reichspräsident (head of state) of the Third Reich this signaled that the European war was over.

On May 7 at his headquarters in Rheims, Eisenhower took the unconditional surrender of all German forces to the western Allies and the Soviet Union, from the German Chief-of-Staff, General Alfred Jodl, who signed the surrender document at 0241 hours. General Franz Böhme announced the unconditional surrender of German troops in Norway. Operations ceased at 2301 hours Central European time (CET) on May 8.

The 1944 – 1945 campaign in hindsight
While the unconditional surrender of Germany represented a resounding Allied success, the path to this outcome was influenced by the strategic decisions of both sides. In retrospect, it is clear that particular factors and choices strongly affected the pace and course of the campaign.


 * The Allied deception as to where the D-Day landings would take place was very successful, with the majority of the German command convinced the landings would take place at Calais. For their part, the Germans underestimated Allied willingness to risk an amphibious assault over a route longer than the shortest path across the English Channel.  While the Allies meticulously planned the landings, they failed to assess the countryside immediately beyond the beaches, which resulted in the Germans very successfully using the hedgerow country (Bocage) as a system of natural defensive works that took the Allies two months to clear at a staggering cost in infantry casualties.  Historians have also asserted the U.S. Army should have landed on the eastern end of the Normandy beaches and formed the northern wing of Allied forces in Northwest Europe.   The primary argument in support of this is that the mobility of American forces could have been better used in the more open terrain and most direct route to Berlin that the northern approach offered.  As it was, the pre-invasion basing of troops in England determined the arrangement of the landing forces.


 * While the Germans had reason to occasionally doubt Allied military proficiency, it is clear the Germans too often underestimated Allied competency. In its most damaging expression, this habit of underestimation led to the rejection of any notion that the Allies might have broken German military ciphers, most famously the Enigma code.  The ability to monitor German military communications was an Allied strategic asset of the highest order.  Less dramatically, the Germans often underestimated Allied troop proficiency, a habit that resulted in occasional sharp defeats for overconfident German units.


 * Manpower strongly affected the course of the campaign. The German ability to form a cohesive defensive line (the so-called "Miracle in the West") after the disaster their forces endured in Normandy was due almost entirely to the ability of the German Ersatzheer (Replacement Army) to quickly deploy large numbers of new troops.  These inexperienced troops were paired with seasoned cadres who swiftly transformed the replacements into combat units sufficiently competent to defend fortified positions. Thus, while the Allies took large numbers of German prisoners during their advance from Normandy to the German border, they underestimated the ability of the Germans to reconstitute their forces under very disadvantageous circumstances.  The Allies also seriously underestimated the infantry casualties their forces would suffer in Northwestern Europe and the number of divisions that would be required to win the campaign.  British manpower shortages became so grave that two infantry divisions had to be disbanded, while the Americans were forced to shake excess personnel out of their logistical and Army Air Force units in order to bring rifle units up to strength.   Shortages of American manpower were strongly aggravated by a tendency to attack head-on regardless of circumstances, a habit that was particularly in evidence during the months of fighting in the Huertgen Forest.   The Allied logistical crisis that dominated their operations from September through December had the further pernicious effect of limiting the number of divisions in England that could be moved onto the continent to reinforce the front, since the Allies were only able to supply a limited number of divisions east of the Seine River.  After the Allies mastered the logistical crisis, the Americans diverted divisions bound for the Pacific Theater to Europe in a belated realization that more divisions were needed for operations in Europe.


 * While the Germans achieved strategic surprise with their offensive in the Ardennes, the Panzer divisions that had been so painstakingly rebuilt could have been more profitably used to defend the Siegfried Line and the Rhineland, or perhaps, in the defense of Berlin against the Red Army. The German thrust failed to shatter their enemies' alliance and cost Germany high casualities and equipment losses it could ill-afford.  This folly was repeated in Alsace in January, but with the added disadvantage this time that the Allies were expecting the attack.


 * The Allies made serious errors and questionable uses of their forces several times during the course of operations in 1944-45.


 * Upon breaking out of Normandy in August, the Americans committed two armored divisions to operations in Brittany when armored units were direly needed for the pursuit of the German army across France. While the port of Brest was ultimately captured by the Americans, it consumed the operations of an American corps for an entire month and ultimately did little for the Allied effort because the Germans so thoroughly destroyed the port before it was captured.


 * Out of fear that two wings of their forces might collide, the Allies failed to definitively close the Falaise Gap in August, allowing trapped German forces an escape route to the east. Although the operations around Falaise trapped a considerable number of German prisoners, experienced German leadership cadres evaded Allied forces and were available to reconstitute a cohesive front line along the Siegfried Line.


 * Although British forces conducted a brilliant pursuit across northern France that resulted in the liberation of the critically important port of Antwerp in early September, they failed to promptly clear the Scheldt Estuary of Germans.  The Germans immediately grasped the significance of the Scheldt Estuary and moved in troops to conduct a lengthy defense.   The Allied failure to swiftly clear the Scheldt Estuary meant the port of Antwerp could not be used until November 28, and strongly contributed to the lengthy logistical crisis that hamstrung Allied operations for four months.  Operation Market-Garden was a double failure in the sense that the resources used for it would have been more profitably committed to clearing the Scheldt Estuary instead of carving out an extended salient that did nothing but extend an already over-extended Allied front line.


 * Despite grave shortages of riflemen, American operations in front of the Siegfried Line, particulary in U.S. First Army's area, were characterized by bloody frontal assaults. Stubbornness and misplaced notions that the U.S. Army could not allow itself to abandon unprofitable operations  saw five infantry divisions shredded in the Huertgen Forest fighting, with the attack being abandoned only in December after the Germans attacked into the Ardennes.  The concentration of divisions in the Huertgen Forest-Aachen area also forced a corresponding lack of concentration along the Ardennes front, with the result that only four U.S. divisions were initially available in the Ardennes to parry a German offensive that was 26 divisions strong.


 * When, in November, the Allies enjoyed significant success in 6th Army Group's area, General Eisenhower refused to reinforce the success and even forbade his commanders in the south to attempt to assault across the Rhine in the area of Strasbourg while the German defenses were in shambles. This lack of bold enterprise was a by-product of General Eisenhower's decision to conduct limited-objective attacks on a broad front even though the Allies lacked a sufficient number of divisions to both man a broad front and concentrate enough combat power in chosen areas to achieve breakthroughs.  (On other instances of cautious Allied generalship:  )


 * After crossing the Rhine, Allied force deployments were tainted by misplaced priorities, lack of firm direction from supreme political echelons  , and to some extent, by exaggerated fears of German capabilities.   When American troops reached the Elbe River in mid-April, General Eisenhower unilaterally decided that Berlin was no longer a significant military objective and ordered U.S. forces to halt along the Elbe and Mulde Rivers.  Thus, these spearheads were practically immobilized while the war raged on for three more weeks.  Simultaneously, General Bradley considered the Germans trapped in the Ruhr Pocket to be the most significant threat and committed suprisingly large numbers of U.S. troops to collapse (as opposed to containing) the pocket instead of reinforcing his troops at the Elbe River.  As a consequence of Eisenhower's decision, British 21st Army Group was ordered to drive northeast in the direction of Hamburg instead of proceeding due east in the direction of Berlin.  Finally, the Allies proved curiously gullible about German propaganda claiming the existence of a "National Redoubt" in the Alpine hinterlands of Bavaria and Austria.  Fearing a large-scale last stand by the Nazis in this so-called redoubt, General Eisenhower directed no less than three field armies to clear southern Germany at a time when the largest groups of German forces stood to the east, not the south, of General Eisenhower's troops.  Fortunately for the Allies, the German Army of April 1945 was in no position to exploit troop concentrations and movements of questionable merit.

Thus, while the Allies enjoyed a great victory, it is equally obvious that their prosecution of the campaign was not flawless, and that on occasion it afforded their German adversaries opportunities that prolonged the fighting unnecessarily.