General Patton and 176,000 Allied Troops Cross the English Channel into Normandy: June 6, 1944

This text comes from our book, Light to the Nations, Part II.

While the British and the Americans fought the Germans in Italy, their air forces had been carrying out bombing raids on Germany itself. But Allied air strikes, though very destructive to both property and human life, did not bring about the results Churchill and Roosevelt had desired. Air raids did not at first seriously hurt Germany’s war production, nor did they break the German spirit. The growing number of civilian deaths by bombing only convinced the Germans that the Allies were brutal enemies who had to be resisted to the very end. The Allied air raids, however, had one benefit—they so weakened the German Luftwaffe that control of the skies now passed to the Allies. 

Control of the airways was important for what the British and Americans now had planned—the invasion of France. The Allies had gathered an army, 2.8 million strong, in southern England for the invasion, which was given the code name of “D-Day.” That day came at last on June 6, 1944. Before dawn, 600 warships and 4,000 support craft, carrying 176,000 British and American troops, all under the command of General Patton, crossed the English Channel into Normandy. The Allies met a strong German defense; indeed, the enemy fought fiercely for every inch of ground and unleashed Hitler’s secret weapon—V-1 “buzz bombs” on London. Yet, the Germans could not halt the Allied advance. By July 24, the Allied armies had driven the Germans from Normandy. The next day, Patton opened the next stage of his campaign—the Battle for France. 

D-Day landings and Patton’s Third Army attacks

In the north of France, General Patton’s army swept through Brittany to the Loire River and the city of Le Mans, destroying the German VII Army. Meanwhile, another Allied army invaded southern France from the ports of Toulon and Marseilles. As this army moved toward Lyons, Patton’s forces were advancing against Paris. On August 25, 1944, General Patton’s army liberated Paris, and Charles de Gaulle took up the presidency of a restored France. The German army in the west was now in full retreat. By September 4, the Allies had entered Belgium, taking Brussels and Antwerp. A week later, another Allied army liberated Luxembourg and crossed into Germany.

In the weeks following the end of the Battle of Stalingrad in January 1943, the Soviet Red Army began a steady advance against the Germans in the east. The Russian army had improved much since the beginning of the war. And as important, the Red Army had grown in size; it now had four times as many men as the Germans, and these (thanks in part to U.S. war production) were better equipped than the Germans with weaponry, tanks, and vehicles. In August 1943, the Red Army defeated the Germans at Kursk—a battle in which the Germans lost 70,000 men and 2,900 tanks. The German army retreated into Ukraine, and by the end of September it had crossed the Dnieper River. Much of eastern Ukraine now lay in Russian hands. 

Throughout the fall of 1943 and the winter of 1944, the Russians gradually pushed the Germans farther and farther west. On June 23, 1944, while Allied forces beat back the Germans in France, the Soviets opened an 800-mile front, from Leningrad to the Carpathian Mountains. In five weeks, Russian forces pushed the Germans entirely out of Ukraine and moved into Poland and Lithuania. By late July, the Red Army reached the outskirts of the Polish capital, Warsaw, and there halted to give the Nazis time to kill Polish patriots who had risen in revolt in the city. Stalin knew the patriots would resist his rule as much as Hitler’s, and so he wanted them safely out of the way before he sent his army into the city. Farther south, the Red Army forced the surrender of Romania, which, under a new government, declared war on Germany.

The Invasion of Germany

Having freed France, the next Allied objective in the west was the invasion of Germany. By the middle of October 1944, the Allies had taken the German city of Aachen (Charlemagne’s ancient capital) as well as the French cities of Metz and Strasbourg. In November, they advanced into the industrial Saar region. But the Allies had trouble breaking through Germany’s Siegfried Line defenses, and the Germans fiercely opposed them. The fire bombings of German cities, resulting in hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, had convinced even Germans who hated Hitler that they had to resist the Allied invasion of their country. The demand, too, for Germany’s unconditional surrender (which Pius XII had begged the Allies to abandon) convinced many Germans they had to fight to the death to save their fatherland from so great a dishonor.

Dresden, Germany, showing ruins resulting from the Allied firebombing of February 13–15, 1945, near the end of World War II

In mid-December 1944, the German army made one last desperate attempt to break the Allied lines in half. In the Battle of the Bulge, the German army assaulted the Allied lines around Bastogne, in southeastern Belgium. Though by December 22 it looked as if the Germans might succeed, four days later Allied reinforcements saved Bastogne. German losses were heavy—1,000 planes destroyed and 120,000 casualties. 

In late January 1945, the Allies resumed their advance to the Rhine while, in the east, the Russians began an invasion of Germany along a thousand-mile front. To hinder the movement of German troops, the Allies began a bombing campaign over eastern German cities. On February 13, 1945, American and British bombers assaulted Dresden, a city that had no military significance and no antiaircraft defenses but was filled with hundreds of thousands of war refugees. For two days, Allied planes dropped incendiary bombs, igniting firestorms that laid waste to the city. The fires that consumed Dresden claimed, some say, 35,000 lives. Others say the number of noncombatant dead in Dresden reached as high as 135,000.