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World War 2:
Victory in the West
Drive to the Elbe
End of Hitler
German Surrender
Accomplishments and Cost
Drive to the Elbe
The unqualified success in the north was the signal
for all Allied armies to begin the victory sweep through Germany. While
approving a plan for the Ninth and First armies to encircle the Ruhr,
with the former remaining under Montgomery's command, General Eisenhower
directed that as soon as the Ruhr was secured, the Ninth Army was to
revert to Bradley's Twelfth Army Group. Bradley's armies then were to
make the main Allied effort along the Erfurt-Leipzig-Dresden axis to
link up with the Russians.
The Third Army began to exploit its Rhine crossing on
March 25, and the next day seized a bridge across the Main River near
Frankfurt and entered the outskirts of the city. On March 29, the First
and Third armies linked their bridgeheads near Wiesbaden. The Seventh
Army in the meantime made an assault crossing of the Rhine on either
side of Worms before daylight on March 26. Other troops of the army
crossed near Mannheim, and on April 1 entered Heidelberg. Alarmed lest
the French be denied a major role in the push through Germany, General
de Lattre speeded the attack preparations of his First Army, crossed
the Rhine before daylight on March 31 near Speyer, and turned southeastward
toward Stuttgart.
The reaction of the German High Command to the advances
of the Sixth Army Group was typical of that all along the front. Hitler
and his entourage in OKW seemed incapable of comprehending the extent
of German losses and reverses. Unable to make additional troops available,
OKW insisted nevertheless that Army Group G counterattack northward
to cut off the Sixth Army Group columns. When this proved impossible,
OKW relieved the group commander. Hitler had already tried to form a
Volksturm (People's Army), but in almost every case these untrained,
ill-armed, poorly equipped troops put up little fight. He called now
for the formation of an underground army of "Werewolves" to
fight the invading armies by any and all methods. It was a dramatic
appeal, but it produced few tangible results.
In the north, Simpson's Ninth Army and Hodges' First
Army swept rapidly toward a juncture on the east face of the Ruhr industrial
area near Paderborn. The drive gained speed from the fact that the Army
Group B commander, Field Marshal Model, had disposed his remaining defenses
facing southward against the Remagen bridgehead and thus was ill prepared
for the First Army's push to the east. What was more, the First Army
drive severed all contact between the forces of Army Group B and Army
Group G. Similarly, Army Group H north of the Ruhr was powerless to
stop the eastward push of the Ninth Army. Though the commander, General
Student, begged permission to fall back behind the Weser River and to
withdraw forces from the Netherlands to help build a new line, Hitler
and OKW rejected the requests. Armored spearheads of the two American
armies met at Lippstadt, 17 miles west of Paderbom, on April 1 to complete
what General Eisenhower called "the largest double envelopment
in history." Caught in the Ruhr pocket was all of Army Group B
with its Fifth Panzer and Fifteenth armies and part of Army Group H’s
First Parachute Army.
After attempting without success to break out of the
pocket, first to the north and then to the south, Field Marshal Model
settled down to fight to the end, hoping thereby to tie up as many Allied
troops as possible. But the end was not long in coming. On April 14,
the Americans cut the pocket in two. Two days later the eastern half
collapsed, and on April 18 all the remaining garrison surrendered. The
final count of prisoners exceeded 325,000. Model himself was reputedly
a suicide. A new United States army headquarters, the Fifteenth under
General Gerow, former 5th Corps commander, came forward to supervise
the final mopping up, while the First and Ninth armies continued to
the east.
As all Allied armies spread out over Germany, their
advances exceeded even those of the great pursuit across France. Drives
of 35 to 50 miles a day were not uncommon. Armored divisions usually
led the way, but infantry units too, the men mounted on attached tanks
or tank destroyers or riding trucks normally used to tow artillery,
made rapid dashes. Many towns and villages lay undefended. All that
stood in the way of capturing others were roadblocks hastily constructed
of heavy logs. Demolished bridges caused the greatest delays, but with
the Germans able to form no solid line even behind sprawling streams
like the Weser, infantrymen quickly paddled across in assault boats
to form a bridgehead while engineers often in less than half a day constructed
pontoon bridges that tanks and other vehicles might use. White flags
raised by an apathetic and supine citizenry flew from every building.
In most cases the Germans put up a half-hearted resistance and then
merely waited for the Allied flood to roll over them. In others some
local commander might instill his troops with special bravado and bring
on a fierce little engagement in the midst of an otherwise unimpeded
advance. This happened at Kassel and left the city in ruins. It happened
also at Heilbronn on the Neckar River, where the Seventh Army required
a week to reduce the city. It happened too in the Harz Mountains, where
contingents of the First Army also found themselves involved for a full
week in a real war again.
On the Reichsautobahnen, the superhighways with which
Hitler had laced the country for moving his military forces, Allied
columns roared up all four lanes, while crowds of dejected German prisoners
or ragged but exuberant slave laborers of almost every nationality in
Europe marched westward down the median strip. Some units overran vast
caches of money and works of art looted by the Nazis from all corners
of occupied Europe. Others came across walking skeletons who somehow
had survived the Nazi concentration camps and mute but grim evidence
of human extermination factories. Supplying the far-ranging motorized
columns was a tremendous, fantastic task. The most critically needed
supplies-gasoline, rations, and ammunition-usually came in by cargo
planes to newly captured airfields. Heavily laden trucks with headlights
ablaze in disdain for whatever might remain of the Luftwaffe roared
through the night on the autobahns. Trucks often had to make 700-mile
round trips to railheads along the Rhine. The first two rail bridges
built across the river were opened on April 8 at Wesel and on April
14 at Mainz.
In the north the British Second Army bridged the Weser
on April 5 and reached the Elbe by April 24. Despite stiff resistance
along the Dortmund-Ems Canal, a column on the British left advanced
to Bremen by April 20, there to fight a week-long battle against a group
of diehard defenders. The columns on the right jumped the lower Elbe
on the last two days of April, and on May 2 took Lubeck without opposition,
thereby cutting off the peninsula of Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark.
The great port of Hamburg surrendered the next day, also without a fight.
The Canadian First Army, driving to cut off the Germans
in the Netherlands, engaged in some of the heaviest fighting of all
during the first few days of April. From a Rhine bridgehead near Emmerich
one column established a bridgehead over the Ems River on April 8, and
then ran into one sharp fight after another en route to the naval bases
at Emden and Wilhelmshaven. To the west another column driving due north
from Emmerich quickly reached the North Sea, cutting what remained of
German forces in the northeastern Netherlands into ineffective pockets.
Still a third force farther west jumped the Lower Rhine on April 12,
cleared Arnhem two days later, and reached the IJsselmeer on April 18.
Four days later, Allied commanders, all too aware of the misery already
besetting the Dutch people for lack of food, suspended attacks on the
promise of the German high commissioner for the Netherlands, Arthur
Seyss-Inquart, that he would avoid wholesale flooding of the lowlying
country. After a meeting between SeyssInquart and Eisenhower's chief
of staff on April 30, the Allies began a program to deliver food and
supplies to the hard-pressed Dutch, but the Germans in the Netherlands
refused to surrender so long as the German government had not capitulated.
In the Allied center troops of the First and Ninth armies
were already on their way to the Elbe even before the final capitulation
in the Ruhr pocket. Armored spearheads of the Ninth Army reached the
river near Magdeburg on April 11, and the next day established a bridgehead
less than 75 miles from Berlin. The Germans reacted stiffly, even calling
in the almost defunct Luftwaffe in troublesome numbers, and forced abandonment
of the bridgehead on April 14, but a second bridgehead established the
preceding day held fast. This bridgehead constituted no more than a
threat, for by this time General Eisenhower had abandoned any idea of
driving on Berlin. Since mid-March, Soviet forces had stood on the Oder
River, only 28 miles east of the capital, with the apparent ability
to take it whenever they chose. In view of this situation, Eisenhower
decided to concentrate instead on defeating the German forces in central
Germany and on driving into the south where rumors picked up by Allied
intelligence seemed to indicate that the Germans were creating a last-ditch
defensive position in the Alps, the so-called National Redoubt. The
Ninth Army was to halt at the Elbe, Eisenhower directed, and the First
Army at the Mulde, a tributary of the Elbe, there to await contact with
Soviet armies from the east. The First Army took Leipzig on April 18.
Already an armored division had bypassed the city to reach the Mulde
River. Patrols sent out by both the First and the Ninth armies made
contact with forward Soviet units on April 25, while the first formal
meeting between United States and Soviet divisional commanders took
place near Torgau on the following day.
Meanwhile, the Third Army had pressed on to the Czechoslovakian
border. With the First and Ninth armies established on their final objectives,
Eisenhower directed the Third Army to sideslip southward for drives
into Czechoslovakia, Bavaria, and Austria close beside the Seventh Army.
The attack picked up momentum on April 22 and began to make the usual
rapid gains at extremely low costs in men. One day, for example, the
entire Third Army lost only 3 men killed, 37 wounded, and 5 missing
while taking 9,000 German prisoners. Breaking through hastily improvised
defenses on the Isar and Inn rivers, contingents of the Third Army on
May 4 seized Linz, Austria. Others pushed into Plzen (Pilsen), already
in the hands of Czech partisans.
The two armies of General Devers' Sixth Army Group meanwhile
had swung southeastward from their Rhine bridgeheads to sweep to the
Swiss border and eventually to enter Austria and link with Allied forces
in northern Italy. In addition to a hard fight at the Neckar, troops
of the Seventh Army had to battle three days for Nurnberg but took the
city on April 20. The French swept through the Black Forest on the east
bank of the Rhine, and on April 22 took Stuttgart. As the Seventh Army
headed into southern Bavaria and the Austrian Tirol to forestall any
establishment there of a National Redoubt, both armies crossed the Danube
on April 22. Munich ( Munchen) fell on April 30 and Salzburg ott May
4, and with the aid of Austrian partisan guides a column pushed to the
Brenner Pass on the same day. Berchtesgaden, site of Hitler's mountain
retreat, also fell on May 4. The myth of a National Redoubt exploded,
Nowhere was there evidence that the Nazis had made preparations for
a last-ditch stand.
End of Hitler
The precise time when Hitler realized that the end was
near is hard to place, but by mid-April it was clearly apparent to him
that Allied and Soviet armies soon would split Germany in two. Reserving
for himself the right to command in whichever part of Germany he happened
to find himself when the split came, he designated Admiral Doenitz,
head of the German Navy, to command in the north should the fuhrer be
in the south. Similarly, he designated Field Marshal Kesselring to command
in the south should he himself be in the north.
By April 22, with Berlin under direct attack from the
Soviet Army since April 16, Doenitz, Goering (heir designate to Hitler's
post), and most other ranking officials had left Berlin for either the
south or the north. Hitler and his military staffs were about all that
remained. The fuhrer apparently had high hopes of prolonging the war
indefinitely until April 22, when a counterattack which he had ordered
to strike the Russians at Berlin from the north failed to materialize.
From this point he vowed to stay in the capital, eventually to kill
himself rather than to fall into the hands of his enemies.
Learning the next day of Hitler's decision to stay in Berlin, Goering
assumed that it was time he took control of the government. When he
radioed for instructions, saying that if he received no answer during
the day of April 23, he would take charge, Hitler considered the act
treasonable. He promptly had Goering arrested. By the end of April,
all concerned had to admit that every effort to relieve Berlin had failed,
and that the city was facing its final fight. Hitler himself, having
composed a will designating Doenitz his successor as head of the German
state and supreme commander of the armed forces, committed suicide.
German Surrender
The possibility of large scale but piecemeal surrender
had been growing since mid-April, but because the Russians were suspicious
lest the Germans make peace with the Allies while continuing to fight
the Soviet armies, the Allies rejected most overtures. As early as April
23, Heinrich Himmler, head of the Waif en-SS, an elite ancillary force
of the German Army, offered to arrange a surrender on the entire western
front, but the heads of Allied governments replied that unconditional
surrender on all fronts, made in agreement with the Allies and the Soviet
Union, was the only acceptable course.
Aware of the agreement between the Western Allies and
the Soviets, Admiral Doenitz nevertheless hoped to save as many German
troops as possible from falling into the hands of the Soviet Army. When
the Allies on April 29 accepted the surrender of German forces in Italy
to become effective on May 2, he began to explore the possibility of
other piecemeal surrenders. This led on May 4 to the surrender of all
forces in the north, including Denmark and the Netherlands, to Montgomery
and the Twenty-first Army Group, though the terms stipulated that the
capitulation would be superseded by any general instrument of surrender
later to be signed. The next day, a similar surrender occurred in the
south, where Army Group G capitulated to the Sixth Army Group.
A German representative authorized to open negotiations
for all remaining forces in the west arrived at General Eisenhower's
headquarters in Reims on May 5. Recognizing that the German scheme was
to gain time in which to bring troops facing the Russians into the western
zone, Eisenhower informed Moscow that he had no intention of accepting
surrender unless it included simultaneous surrender to the Soviets.
The Russians in turn authorized Maj. Gen. Ivan Susloparov, already at
Eisenhower's headquarters, to act for them. The negotiations began in
the late afternoon of May 5. When General Eisenhower made it known that
unconditional simultaneous surrender on all fronts was the requirement,
the head of the German delegation wired Doenitz for approval. The admiral
and those around him were shocked. Doenitz hastily sent General Jodl,
head of the OKW operations staff and a strong opponent of surrender
in the east, to continue the negotiations at Reims.
When Jodl arrived, he found Eisenhower unyielding. Unless
the Germans agreed quickly to surrender, Eisenhower said, he would break
off all negotiations and seal the western front to prevent the further
westward movement of German troops and civilians. Even Jodl, steadfast
opponent of over-all surrender though he was, was impressed. He telegraphed
Doenitz for permission to sign. The Germans signed at 2:41. A.M. on
May 7. The next day, May 8, the Allied chiefs of staff designated as
V-E (Victory in Europe) Day. A second surrender ceremony, with ranking
Russians in attendance, took place in Berlin on May 9.
Accomplishments and Cost
As hostilities came to an end, the German war machine
and the German nation were crushed to a degree never before experienced
in modern times. With the prior surrender of Army Groups B, G, and H
and with the steamroller advance of the Soviet armies, no organized
military units remained at the time of the over-all surrender except
in Norway and in Czechoslovakia and the Balkans. These were incapable
of more than a week or two of resistance even had they chosen to prolong
the fight. Though some jet fighter aircraft remained, the Luftwaffe
was too demoralized even to make a final suicidal effort. What was left
of the German Navy lay helpless in the captured northern ports. Hitler's
Germany was prostrate, beaten by powerful Soviet armies and by an Allied
force that at war's end totaled 4,581,000 men in a balanced air-ground
military machine. Under Eisenhower's command on V-E Day were nine armies,
23 corps, and 93 divisions and air strength totaling 17,192 planes.
Since D-day in Normandy the Germans in the west alone had lost 263,000
dead, 49,000 permanently disabled, and 8,109,000 captured. Allied casualties
were 186,900 dead, 545,700 wounded, and 109,600 missing ( some later
declared dead and others later repatriated as prisoners of war).
Any analysis of the victory must begin with the stubborn
refusal of Britain and the Soviet Union to yield early in the war when
the odds against them appeared overwhelming, and it must include the
vast contribution by the United States both in manpower and as the arsenal
of democracy. United States troops comprised more than two thirds of
Eisenhower's command at the end of the war. During the last two years
alone, American factories produced for the British 185,000 vehicles,
12,000 tanks, and enough planes to equip four tactical air forces; for
the Russians, 247,000 vehicles, 4,000 tanks, and enough planes to equip
two tactical air forces; and for the French, all weapons and equipment
for 13 divisions and their logistical and air support. Thus, unlike
the situation in World War I, when the American contribution was relatively
small and merely provided the tilt in the balance of power, the reconquest
of western Europe in World War II saw a predominant American contribution.
Though airpower failed to prove the decisive instrument
that its more outspoken prewar advocates had predicted, it was a major
factor in the Allied victory. The naval role was vital as well, for
without control of the sea lanes, Allied power could not have been concentrated
in England, and without the landing craft, amphibious doctrine, and
fire support provided by Allied navies, the assaults against the beaches
of Normandy and southern France could not have been staged. But it was
not until Allied ground troops fought their way to a juncture with the
Russians that Germany's will was broken.
Throughout the war, Hitler and much of the German nation
put their faith in miracle weapons that never came. Postwar revelations
have shown that the Germans had not advanced as far toward an atomic
bomb as Allied intelligence had feared. The only spectacular accomplishments
in miracle weapons were the V-1 (flying bomb) and the V-2 (supersonic
rocket). Between June 1944 and March 1945, when the last of the launching
sites were overrun, the Germans fired 18,300 V-1's and 3,000 V-2's,
about equally divided between England and targets on the Continent,
notably Antwerp. They inflicted 33,400 casualties in England and about
13,000 on the Continent, but never seriously affected the military campaign
other than to divert antiaircraft troops and radar equipment to the
defense of London and Antwerp.
In quality of weapons and equipment the greatest Allied
advantage over the Germans was in heavy bombers and long-range fighters,
an achievement never seriously challenged by the Luftwaffe despite the
German development of the first supersonic rocket and the first jetpropelled
aircraft. In all cases these came too late to affect the outcome of
the war. In artillery, mortars, and machine guns both sides were relatively
equal, though a technique of massed artillery fire used by the British
and Americans was a noteworthy achievement. The Americans enjoyed some
firepower advantage with a semiautomatic rifle, but a German machine
pistol widely used in rifle battalions drew the respect of all Allied
troops. German tanks throughout the war were superior to the Allied
mainstay, the United States Sherman, both in armor and armament, and
the German 88-mm. gun, effective against tanks, aircraft, and personnel,
was the World War II equivalent of the French 75. American motor vehicles,
particularly the highly serviceable two-and-one-half-ton truck, made
the Allies markedly superior in the field of motor transport and were
in a large measure responsible for fantastic Allied achievements in
the field of logistics. The combined staff system of the United States
and Britain provided a unity of command and purpose never approached
on the Axis side.
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