With the decisive battles of El Alamein, Midway, and Stalingrad, the initiative in the war had clearly passed to the Allies by 1943. Defeat of the Axis powers was not, however, assured. Germany still controlled all of Western Europe, and Japan retained most of her conquests of the months following Pearl Harbor. Only in the Soviet Union were Axis forces in retreat. Having born the brunt of the German assault in 1941 and 1942, the Soviet Union demanded that her western allies open a second front against the Nazis as soon as possible. President Roosevelt was also anxious to get U.S. ground troops into battle against the Germans as swiftly as possible, but the Western Allies were fearful that a direct attack on Nazi-occupied Europe could produce a disaster similar to the Gallipoli campaign of the First World War.

The practical difficulty of opening a second front in Europe was that it required the development of an entirely new form of warfare. For Britain and the United States to mount an attack on Germany’s Festung Europa (Fortress Europe), it would require a series of amphibious landings against heavily defended shorelines. Despite Soviet pleas, the western allies believed that they were far too weak to attempt an invasion of Western Europe itself in 1943. For a successful cross-channel landing in France, the British and U.S. believed they would have to capture a major port in which to resupply their forces. A raid on the French port of Dieppe, undertaken primarily by Canadian forces in August 1942, proved to be a disaster. Of the 5,000 Canadians who took part in the mission, 3,400 were killed, wounded, or captured. After nine hours of bitter fighting, the remaining troops were evacuated. The failure of the Dieppe Raid convinced the British that an invasion of France was impossible in the near future. Originally committed to any early invasion of France, President Roosevelt finally acquiesced (agreed to) to a British plan to mount an amphibious invasion in North Africa instead.

Operation Torch began in November of 1942 with combined British and American landings in Morocco and Algiers under the command of American General Dwight D. Eisenhower. These areas were under the Nazi-controlled French government at Vichy. Marshall Pétain’s government had collaborated with the Nazis in the hopes that the French would be able to maintain some form of independence in the southern half of France that was unoccupied by the Germans. Vichy officials cooperated with the Germans in rounding up French Jews for deportation and attacking anti-Nazi resistance fighters. In previous actions in Syria and on Madagascar, the Vichy French had put up a spirited defense against the British. With the Americans take the leading role in the invasion and by not involving Vichy’s rivals, the Free French under Charles DeGaulle, it was hoped that the French forces in North Africa would present only token opposition.

When the landings began on November 8, the French fought hard to repel them, especially near Casablanca. Two days later the French military commander, Admiral Darlan, negotiated a deal with the Allies by which the French ceased their resistance in return for Darlan being named commander of French North Africa. This deal with Darlan, one of the leaders of the Vichy regime, was strongly criticized by DeGaulle. In response to this deal, the Germans swiftly occupied the remainder of France.

The U.S. invasion forces moved swiftly eastward where they hoped to trap Rommel’s forces retreating from the British after the Battle of El Alamein. The Germans quickly dispatched additional troops to Tunisia to attempt to halt the pincer (pinching action) movement. Having moved west from Egypt across Libya, the Germans, now threw the full weight of their forces in Africa against the inexperienced Americans and inflicted a serious defeat on them in the Battle of Kasserine Pass in Tunisia where the U.S. suffered 6,000 casualties in February 1943:

Following the defeat at Kasserine Pass, General George S. Patton soon regrouped the American troops and began an effective counteroffensive. With the help of British forces attacking from the east under General Montgomery, the American offensive finally drove the last Germans from Africa in May 1943, capturing 275,000 prisoners.

In January 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill met at Casablanca to discuss the next step in the joint Anglo-American war effort. Two important decisions were made at the Casablanca Conference. The first was FDR’s surprise announcement that the Allies would accept only unconditional surrender from the Axis. Roosevelt used these terms primarily to assure the Soviets that the western allies would not make a separate peace with Germany and Italy. The second decision was to launch an invasion of Sicily in order to gain complete control of the Mediterranean. Churchill believed the Italians to be the weak link in the Axis and advocated further postponement of a cross-channel invasion of France in favor of what he believed was the "soft underbelly of Europe."

On July 10, 1943, American and British armies landed in the extreme southeast of Sicily. Prior to the invasion the Allies had engaged in a skillful deception. Planting false invasion plans for Greece on the body of a fictitious British officer, the body was allowed to wash ashore in Spain. When the "lost" orders reached the Germans they transferred a tank division and several warships east to Greece from Italy.

While the German forces on Sicily fought hard, most of the island’s defenders were ill-trained Italian coastal reserve forces that quickly surrendered:

The island was captured in thirty-eight days at the cost of 16,500 Allied casualties. Axis losses exceeded 120,000 men, including 100,000 prisoners. The most important result of the attack on Sicily was the fall from power of Benito Mussolini. The Italian people had become increasingly weary of the war and their German allies. In the hope of avoiding an Allied attack on the Italian mainland, the Fascist Grand Council voted on July 25 to remove Mussolini from power and place him under arrest. His successor was Marshal Badoglio who had earlier led the Italian conquest of Ethiopia. Badoglio hoped to negotiate terms with the Allies that would allow Italy to end its participation in the war. In the meantime, Hitler began moving troops south into Italy to defend against an Italian collapse.

On September 3, British and Canadian troops landed at Calabria on the toe of the Italian peninsula. That same day, Badoglio signed an armistice with the Allies. The Italian surrender was kept secret in hopes that it would forestall a German invasion of Italy. When the terms of the armistice were announced on September 8, American troops preparing to land further up the peninsula at Salerno expected little opposition. They were badly mistaken as they were almost driven into the sea by the German defenders that had quickly moved into position to replace the Italians:

After clinging to the beaches for three days, the invaders received massive air support and finally gained a secure foothold. The relative success of the hastily organized defense of Salerno, however, convinced Hitler to change his Italian strategy. After the Italian collapse, the Germans had planned to withdraw to Northern Italy and await the Allied forces there. Hitler now decided that his troops would contest every inch of Italian soil. Churchill’s assumptions of an easy victory in Italy proved to be a tragic error. The mountainous landscape provided the Germans with many natural defense lines. The Italian campaign often resembled the western front of the First World War as wave after wave of Allied troops bashed their way into the German defenses. Each time the Germans inflicted heavy casualties before eventually withdrawing to another defense line. On September 9, Hitler dispatched commandos to rescue his old ally Mussolini. The imprisoned Duce was flown to the north of Italy where Hitler installed him as the leader of a German puppet regime.

By January, Germany had moved eight divisions into Italy and established a powerful defensive line sixty miles south of Rome called the Gustav Line. There the Allied offensive soon bogged down against the powerful, entrenched Nazi forces at Monte Cassino early in 1944:

The fighting at Cassino was especially brutal as the Allies attempted four times to break through the German lines between January and May 1944. An Allied attempt to outflank the Germans by landing further up the coast at Anzio also bogged down, as 70,000 German troops were able to prevent the Allies from expanding their beachhead. Complicating the fighting at Monte Cassino was the presence of a huge sixth century monastery, which had been the founding place of the Benedictine Order. Sitting atop the hill with a view of the Allied attackers below, the abbey commanded the entire field of fire. Distrustful of German pledges not to use the abbey, the British ordered its destruction by air:

The destruction of the abbey was a tragic mistake. The Allied air attacks did not kill a single German soldier, but devastated the shrine and killed thousands of civilians who had sought refuge there. The Germans moved into the rubble and became even harder to dislodge. In May, the Anglo-Americans massed their multinational troops for a fourth attempt to dislodge the Germans and finally broke through the German defenses on May 11. Less than a month later, Rome fell to the Allies on June 4, 1944. Two days later, the British and Americans finally landed in France.

The Italian campaign became less important as both the Allies and the Germans placed a greater priority for men and supplies on the fighting in France. Nevertheless, the slow, costly Allied progression north in Italy continued, and the entire country had not been liberated when the war ended in the spring of 1945. The Allies suffered 300,000 casualties (in comparison with German losses exceeding 400,000) during the Italian campaign. Churchill’s predictions of an easy victory proved to be a grievous (regrettable) error. It postponed the invasion of France by as much as a year. It also deeply embittered the Soviet Union, which was convinced that America and Britain were deliberately delaying an invasion of France in order to force the Russians to absorb the bulk of the German war effort. Britain and the United States were, however, able to divert some German forces from the fighting in the Soviet Union. By 1944, German defeat seemed much closer as the Soviets were advancing steadily toward the west and the Anglo-Americans were finally planning to land in France and drive eastward.

Strategic bombing made its debut in the Second World War. Prior to the war it was assumed that no country could stand up to the widespread bombing of its cities. The Germans hoped that their terror bombing of London in 1940-41 would force the British to ask for peace terms. The Blitz, however, had exactly the opposite effect from what Hitler intended. Rather than destroying morale, it stiffened it. Despite the damage, the Blitz was never close to altering Britain’s dedication to carrying out the war against Germany.

The failure of the Blitz did not deter Britain from carrying forth its own plans to bomb Germany. With her armies only able to engage the Germans in North Africa in 1940-42, the British saw bombing as one way that they could carry the war directly to Germany. Early in the war the British experimented with daytime attempts to conduct pinpoint raids on industrial and military targets. German defenses proved to be too strong, and the enormous losses of planes and aircrews forced the British to abandon this strategy by 1941. With daylight precision bombing impossible, the British turned to night raids. Although casualties were reduced, there was a major loss in accuracy. Estimates held that only one bomb in ten fell within five miles of its target. Britain therefore had to depend on "area bombing" by which large numbers of bombs were dropped in the hope that some would hit strategic targets. Just as with the Luftwaffe’s attacks on Britain, a large number of civilian casualties resulted. Many members of the British Chiefs of Staff questioned whether the limited strategic value of bombing Germany justified the enormous cost in men and material.

In early 1942, Air Marshal Arthur Harris assumed command of the British Bomber Command. Nicknamed "Bomber Harris," he was determined to convince British military leaders of the value of the bombing campaign. Having witnessed the Blitz, Harris believed that incendiary (fire) bombs were more effective in destroying cities than the high explosive bombs that the Germans had relied upon. Harris began to plan a demonstration raid that would convince his military superiors to strengthen Bomber Command. On May 30, 1942, Harris sent 1,050 bombers to attack the city of Cologne. High explosive bombs were used to blow apart buildings, followed by incendiaries to start fires. The fires set by the raid on Cologne burned for two days, and about 20,000 homes, 1,500 businesses, and 60 factories were severely damaged. The British lost only 44 of their planes. More damage was done to Cologne in one night than had been done to all of Germany previously in the war. Still, the 1,000-plane raid did not "wipe Cologne off the map" as Harris had hoped. The two other massive raids (on Essen and Bremen) that followed Cologne had similar results, although German industrial production was hardly affected. Throughout 1942, the British continued to refine their tactics. Strips of tin foil were dropped from planes to confuse German radar, and constant experimentation was conducted on the best ways to group planes and approach targets.

By 1943 the U.S. had joined the bombing campaign. With the assistance of the Norden Bombsight, the Americans ignored Britain’s previous experience and maintained that precision strategic bombing was possible. With the Norden, Americans believed that they could "put a bomb in a pickle barrel" from 30,000 feet. The Americans built far larger bombers than the British and believed that they could better defend themselves against German fighter attacks, although their planes were heavier, required more crewmembers, and could deliver fewer bombs. What evolved in 1943-1944 was a day-night Allied bombing strategy. The British continued their massive area bombing by night, while the Americans conducted precision bombing by day.

Few areas of the war saw more technological advancement than did the air war. Radar was a decisive element of Britain’s victory in the Battle of Britain and was soon copied by the Nazis. Continued improvements allowed planes to be directed toward their targets with greater accuracy and to bomb in bad weather. Planes became larger as well as faster. Bombers increased in size to carry additional armaments and bomb payloads. Fighters became faster and capable of flying at higher altitudes. The Germans made two key improvements in air warfare late in the war, the jet airplane and the radio controlled rocket or "flying bomb." A German jet fighter debuted late in 1944, having been delayed by Hitler’s hopes to develop an ultra-fast jet bomber with which to attack England. The Messerschmitt 262 was capable of flying over a hundred miles per hour faster than any Allied plane. The V-1 rocket made its debut in the summer of 1944. Shaped like a pilot-less plane, the V-1 was used mainly against London. During the last year of the war, 10,000 were launched against London with only a third successfully reaching their targets. The bombs caused over 6,000 deaths, mostly civilian. In the fall of 1944 the V-2 rocket made its debut. More advanced than the V-1, it resembled a modern rocket rather than an airplane. With preset guidance, it utilized a fuel mixture of alcohol and liquid oxygen. An average of five rockets fell on London per day between September 1944 and March 1945, killing 2,700:

Despite the German lead in technology, the Luftwaffe lacked the men and fuel to defend German cities against increased aerial attack in 1944-1945. Longer-range fighter escorts, often with detachable reserve fuel tanks, provided greater protection for Allied bombers. During the entire war, the Allies dropped 2,700,000 tons of bombs on Germany with 72% of these falling after June 1944. In July of 1944, two days and nights of bombing over Hamburg created a firestorm that set the city ablaze to the point where all of the oxygen was sucked out of the underground shelters and the occupants either suffocated or were baked alive from the heat. In all, the weeklong raids wiped out 6,000 acres of the city, killed an estimated100, 000, and left another 750,000 people homeless. A February 1945, British and American night-day raid on the city of Dresden caused an even more destructive firestorm, killing 60,000. These massive bombing raids, directed mainly against civilians, were controversial. Even Churchill, an advocate of the bombing campaign, began to express doubt over the morality of Harris’ tactics. Unrepentant (without regret), Harris commented that he did not regard "the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Genadier." By the end of the war in Europe, German’s cities were in tatters, but the role of the bombing in winning the war remains in doubt. Even the massive raids on Hamburg cut German war production by less than two months, and there was no evidence that the incessant bombing ever hindered German morale. The severe lack of supplies that Germany experienced late in the war was due more to a lack of manpower and resources that the destruction caused by the bombing.

Serious planning for an Allied invasion of France had begun as early as 1941. After the Americans had entered the war, the Soviets began to call for a second front in France to relieve the pressure on the eastern front. Although the Americans had pressed for an invasion in 1943, Churchill had urged caution, perhaps remembering the slaughter at Gallipoli that had nearly ruined his career during the First World War. It was Churchill who had urged the landings in Italy as an alternative to a cross-channel invasion, and he even proposed invading the Balkans rather than France. In late November 1943 the three leaders of the Allied alliance met for the first time at the Tehran Conference in Iran. Although Churchill continued to argue that Italy should be the western allies’ top priority, Stalin continued to press for an invasion of France as soon as possible. Roosevelt agreed and the cross-channel invasion date was set for May of 1944. In return, Stalin agreed to open a massive attack on the eastern front to coincide with the invasion and to join the war in the Pacific after Germany’s defeat.

There were many difficulties with a cross-channel invasion. The first was to decide where to land. The closest route was the passage from Dover to Calais. This route was obvious both to the Allies and the Germans, and the Germans heavily fortified the French side of the Pas de Calais. A second option was to strike farther south in Normandy. Although necessitating a sea journey three times as far as through the Pas de Calais, the Normandy option had three strong advantages. It was less obvious, had level beaches with few cliffs, and was close to the port of Cherbourg. One of the great difficulties of an amphibious invasion was being able to move in enough supplies to sustain the attack after the initial beaches were taken. The failure of the Dieppe Raid had pointed out the difficulties of attempting to seize a port directly, but Allied planners believed that an assault on Normandy could quickly move south and west, cutting off the Cherbourg peninsula and thus capturing the port without a direct assault. In a meeting in Quebec during the summer of 1943, FDR and Churchill had agreed on Normandy as the eventual invasion site. Plans progressed under the code-name COSSAC. One of COSSAC’s largest goals was to convince the Germans that Calais was their target. A dummy army was built at Dover, complete with plywood and inflatable tanks. The American officer the Germans feared most, General George Patton, was placed in charge of this fake invasion force. Meanwhile, in the south of England, men and material began to assemble under the leadership of General Eisenhower who was to command the invasion.

The Germans knew an invasion was coming in the spring of 1944, but hey did not know where, and were bitterly divided as to how best to combat it. The "Desert Fox," General Erwin Rommel, had been recalled from Italy to take over the completion of the Atlantic Wall of defenses. Rommel believed that the best place to defeat the Allied invasion was on the beaches. He commented that the first day of the invasion would be "the longest day" of the war and that if the Germans could not prevail in hurling the invasion force back into the sea, the war would be lost. The problem with Rommel’s strategy was that to defeat the invasion on the beaches, troops had to be massed at the invasion site and the Germans were uncertain where this would be. By 1944, virtually every German spy in England had either been arrested or was being used to feed the Germans false information. The alternative to meeting the invasion on the beaches was to keep the main German forces back from the coast, allowing them to move swiftly to wherever the Allies landed. The danger of this strategy was that the growing Allied air superiority would prevent the Germans from being able to reach the invasion point quickly enough. In the end, the Germans compromised. The Allied deception worked wonderfully, as Hitler fully believed that the invasion would come through the Pas de Calais. Most of their troops were located near Calais, with a few held in reserve to the south.

Eisenhower’s plans for the invasion, now known as Overlord, called for five land and three airborne divisions to attack five beach areas. The Americans would land at Utah and Omaha beaches, the British at Gold and Sword, with a primarily Canadian division landing between the two British divisions at Juno Beach. The primary parachute targets would be at Ste-Mere Eglise behind Utah Beach and at the Pegasus Bridge behind Sword Beach.

The original target date for the invasion was May 1, but Eisenhower’s insistence on additional troops pushed it back to June 5. Horrible weather on June 4 convinced Eisenhower to postpone another day, but Allied meteorologists assured him that the weather would clear for a brief time on the 6th. The poor weather convinced Rommel that the invasion was not imminent, and he briefly returned to Germany to celebrate his wife’s fiftieth birthday.

Overlord finally began on the night of June 5 when paratroopers were dropped behind German coastal defenses to sever communications and seize key defense posts. The next morning 5,000 ships approached the French coast, and 11,000 aircraft were in action over western France. Almost three million soldiers, sailors and airmen were involved in the invasion. June 6, 1944 would forever be known as D-Day.

The troops began to land at 6:30 a.m. Days of bombing and an hour-long naval bombardment had preceded the invasion. In the first day, 156,000 men landed along the fifty-mile front:

As with any operation of this magnitude, everything did not go as planned. The paratroopers assigned to land behind Utah Beach landed in the marshes near the Douve River. Many were unable to disengage their parachutes and heavy equipment in time to avoid drowning in the swamp. The naval bombardment did not knock out the German artillery positions on the cliffs overlooking the beaches. Landmines and heavy machine gun fire met many troops as they waded ashore.

At four of the beaches things went pretty much as planned, but on Omaha Beach the Americans were in danger of being thrown back into the sea. Unlike the other beaches where the defenders were either unprepared or engaged in fighting the paratroopers who had landed the previous night, at Omaha the invaders were met by a well-equipped, veteran German division. In addition, a high cliff, Ponte du Hoc, was fitted with heavy guns that commanded the beaches. Attempts to bomb these bunkers failed as the aircraft overshot their targets, and the bombs landed harmlessly on French cows. The first American wave directed against Omaha was blasted before the troops even reached the shore. Tanks had been equipped with inflation collars to allow them to drift ashore, but 27 of the 32 tanks capsized and sank in the choppy waters. The ships off shore continued to pound Point du Hoc, and a battalion of U.S. Rangers slowly made their way up the vertical cliffs to destroy the guns. Although the Americans suffered 2,000 casualties on Omaha Beach, they held. The decisive factor was probably the huge numbers of men and the supplies that the Allies were able to put ashore. Another factor was that the Germans did not move swiftly to bring their reserves up to reinforce the beaches. Hitler still believed that the real invasion would come at Calais and resisted Rommel’s appeals to dispatch reserve tank units to Normandy. Poor communications and the sabotage efforts of the French resistance also delayed the German response. There were over 9,000 Allied casualties the first day, but they held the beaches. Festung Europa had been breached.

Within the first six days, despite the fierce fighting, the Allies were able to land 360,000 men in France. Every bit as important as the men were the supplies needed to support them. After Dieppe, the Allies had abandoned their efforts to immediately seize an existing harbor. Instead they brought their own harbors with them. To accomplish the awesome task of resupplying such a huge force, the Allies had constructed two huge artificial harbors, known as Mulberries. It took 132 tugboats to haul these concrete piers across the channel. Along with smaller artificial harbors, the Mulberries provided vital shelter from the harsh waters of the English Channel. Even when bad weather destroyed one of the Mulberries, the other was sufficient for supporting the invasion until the port of Cherbourg was secured on June 27. In addition, twenty pipelines below the Channel were used to bring in critical supplies of gasoline for the tanks.

It took almost two months for the Allies to secure their position in Normandy. In terms of territory seized, the invasion was a month and a half behind schedule, but in terms of men and material landed, it was right on schedule. On July 25, Allied troops finally broke through the German lines between Caen and Saint-Lo and then fanned out into open country. General Omar Bradley’s First Army smashed the German lines after a heavy bombardment. Patton’s Third Army, spearheaded by heavy tank attacks, then broke through the hole Bradley had created and began a steady drive into the heart of France. British forces under Montgomery, with heavy air support, moved east toward Falaise. After three days of harsh fighting near Falaise, American, British and Canadian forces entrapped the retreating German armies. When the fighting near Falaise finally ended on August 20, 10,000 Germans had been killed and another 50,000 taken prisoner. Meanwhile the Germans were handicapped by the huge Soviet offensive in the east and a second Allied landing on the southern French coast on August 15. The southern invasion forces quickly seized Marseilles and Nice and threatened to cut German forces in France in two.

After Falaise, Allied armies streaked rapidly eastward. Forces commanded by Patton reached the Seine River thirty miles south of Paris on August 19:

Eisenhower had originally intended to bypass Paris to avoid fighting in the city but on August 19, both the communist and Gaullist (supporters of DeGaulle) resistance forces staged a rebellion in Paris. The German commander, Gen. Dietrich von Choltitz, had been ordered by Hitler to "fight to the last man" and then burn the city. Fortunately, Von Choltitz refused. De Gaulle then totally bypassed the Allied chain of command and ordered the Free French Second Armored Division to move into the capital. On August 24, French forces re-entered their capital, and the next day the Germans surrendered. The French humiliation of 1940 had been avenged as De Gaulle marched triumphantly down the Champs Élyseés, and Paris exploded in celebration. Time’s Chief War Correspondent, Charles Christian Wertenbaker, described the joyous scene:

For a time it appeared that the war in Europe was close to an end in the late summer of 1944. In July, a group of German officers and civilians, naively hoping to convince the Western Allies to make peace, had tried to kill Hitler by placing a bomb in his headquarters in East Prussia. The bomb, planted by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a wounded war hero, exploded, killing three officers but inflicted only minor injuries on Hitler. Afterward, the Gestapo hunted down everyone suspected of any involvement in the plot. Von Stauffenberg was promptly arrested and shot. One of the other suspects was Gen. Rommel, who was allowed to commit suicide. Many of the other conspirators were not so fortunate. They were tried in a public court in Berlin and then executed by hanging with piano wire. Hitler ordered their excruciatingly slow deaths filmed for his viewing.

By mid-September, the Allies had reached the border of Belgium in the north and Germany itself in the south. At the same time, on the eastern front, the Russian advance was pouring westward. By mid-July 1944, the Soviets were deep into Poland and by the end of August had crossed into the Balkans. The Soviets had reached the Vistula River upstream from Warsaw by the end of the July. With liberation near, the Polish underground Home Army commanded by General Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski staged an uprising on August 1. Like the French, the Polish hoped to play a major role in liberating their capital. The Home Army, who were loyal to the anti-Communist Polish exile government in London, disrupted the Germans for several days and awaited the arrival of the Soviet forces. They never came. Stalin halted his armies at the Vistula, leaving the undermanned and poorly armed Poles to fight the Germans alone. For over two weeks, Stalin refused to allow U.S. planes to use Soviet airfields for making supply flights to the Home Army. The Warsaw Rising thus became one of the most controversial events of the war. The Soviets insisted that their armies had to be resupplied after their rapid advances of the early summer and could advance no further. Others contended that Stalin deliberately paused to allow the Germans to destroy the anti-communist Poles. Relations between the Soviets and the London-based Polish exile government had already been strained for over a year. In May 1943, the Germans had produced evidence linking the USSR to the deaths of some 25,000 Polish officers and civilians found buried in mass graves in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk. The Soviets vigorously denied that they were responsible for the massacre that took place in 1940 and blamed the Nazis. As a result of this controversy, Stalin had severed relations with the Polish exile government in London. Stalin also insisted that the postwar Soviet-Polish boundary would have to be the one established after the Polish defeat in 1939 and not the much more eastern Soviet-Polish border that had existed prior to the war. Without outside assistance, the Home Army was crushed, and by October, the Germans were once again in control of the city. 15,000 members of the Home Army were killed as were as many as 250,000 civilians. The Nazis destroyed most of the city before it was finally occupied by the Soviets in January 1945.

Although halted outside of Warsaw, the Soviets continued to advance elsewhere in the fall of 1944. Romania surrendered on August 23, and in early September the Red Army entered Bulgaria, knocking the Bulgarians out of the war. In October, the Soviets entered Yugoslavia, although Tito’s partisans had already liberated most of the country. By January 1945, the Soviet forces were fighting for Budapest and moving through East Prussia. Caught between the Western Allies moving on its western border and the Russians pouring in from the east, the defeat of Nazi Germany appeared imminent.

Throughout 1944, many German leaders hoped that the Allied offense in the west could be halted and the western allies persuaded to make a peace that would allow them to continue to defend against the Soviet advance from the east. Knowing full well of the atrocities committed by the Germans in the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Germans were terrified by the prospect of a Soviet invasion. The July plot to kill Hitler was motivated by the mistaken belief that, with Hitler out of the way, Britain and the U.S. would come to terms with Germany rather than allow the Soviet armies to drive into the heart of Europe. Despite growing mistrust, the Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union maintained their policy of unconditional surrender and prepared for the invasion of Germany.

Eager to enter Germany as early as possible, British General Montgomery argued for a bold airborne operation to leap across the Rhine River in Holland. Three airborne divisions would be landed sixty miles behind the German lines where they would secure several key Rhine bridgeheads in Holland until the Allied armies could reach them. Eisenhower opposed Operation Market-Garden, preferring to advance more slowly across a broader front, but finally gave in to the British. Market-Garden began on September 17 with the landing of 16,500 paratroopers and an additional 3,500 troops in gliders. It soon became a disaster. The Allies were unaware that there were two SS tank divisions in the area. The lightly armed Allied troops were unable to secure the bridges against fierce German opposition. Bad weather made airborne relief impossible, and the main Allied force could not reach the forward positions around Arnhem. The Allies suffered almost 10,000 casualties (most as captives) in the failed mission. The failure of Market-Garden pointed out several weaknesses of the Allied position in the west. In their rapid dash across France, supply lines had been stretched to the breaking point. Antwerp, in Allied occupied Belgium, was the only major port supplying the Allied armies facing the Germans in the north. Patton’s forces, further south near Luxembourg, were also low on supplies.

On Dec. 16, 1944, the Germans launched an all-out attack against the Allied lines, known as the Battle of the Bulge. The attack took the Allies totally by surprise. With a quarter of a million men and a massive tank force, the Germans hit the center of the Allied lines at the thinly held Ardennes area that had been the sight of the Nazi breakthrough in 1940. The German goal was to drive a wedge between the Allied forces and capture Antwerp, depriving the Allies of their only port and either stalling the Allied offensive or forcing a Dunkirk-style evacuation:

For a week the Germans drove deeply into Allied-held territory, penetrating over fifty miles. They surrounded the city of Bastogne and demanded the surrender of the American forces under the command of Gen. Anthony McAuliffe:

Eisenhower then ordered Patton and his Third Army to turn north toward the fighting. As the German offensive slowed due to a lack of fuel for its tanks, Patton rolled up against its exposed southern flanks. By December 26, Bastogne was relieved, and the bulge that the Germans had forced in the Allied lines was now being pinched off. With the offensive losing its steam, Hitler once again refused to allow his generals to retreat. The initial Nazi success became a crushing defeat as their advancing armies were encircled and destroyed. Three weeks after the attack, the Allies had reoccupied the entire bulge. In the fighting, both sides lost approximately 100,000 men (the greatest American losses of the war), and the Germans lost the bulk of their tanks in the west. Little was left to oppose the invasion of Germany in the spring.

The Soviets launched their offensive on the eastern part of Germany on January 12, 1945. They stormed across the Vistula, finally captured Warsaw, and drove into Germany itself. Eleven Soviet armies, composed of 2.5 million men and 6,500 tanks smashed into Germany. By the end of January, a Soviet Army under the command of General Zhukov was only 40 miles away from Berlin. February and March were spent consolidating their flanks, but in April they began their drive on Berlin.

The three Allied leaders met for the final time in February 1945 in the Soviet Crimea resort town of Yalta. At the Yalta Conference, the structure of postwar Europe was determined. Germany was to be divided into four zones of occupation to be administered by the U.S., Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Berlin, which fell into the Soviet zone, was to be similarly divided into four sections. The most contentious discussions centered upon the future of Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe. Already, the Soviets had organized a pro-communist Polish government in Lublin while the western allies continued to support the London-based Polish government in exile. It was decided at Yalta that the governments of Eastern Europe would be temporarily composed of all anti-fascist elements, implying a coalition of communist and non-communist parties, until democratic elections could be held. Stalin’s demands that the USSR retain the territory it had obtained in the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact and that Poland be compensated with territory from Germany’s eastern provinces were granted. In return, the Soviets repeated their pledge to enter the war against Japan, promising to declare war on Japan three months after Germany’s surrender. Tired by his long journey to Yalta, an ill Roosevelt returned to the United States and addressed Congress while sitting in a chair, publicly acknowledging his paralysis for the first time. Less than two months later, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945 while visiting his vacation home in Warm Springs, Georgia.

American troops under Gen. Bradley pushed on in the meantime toward the Rhine and early in March captured the city of Cologne on the river’s west bank. The next day, through a remarkable stroke of luck, he discovered and seized an undamaged bridge over the river at Remagen, and Allied troops were soon pouring across the Rhine. In the following weeks the British commander, Montgomery, with a million troops, pushed into Germany in the north while Bradley’s army, sweeping through central Germany, completed the encirclement of 300,000 German soldiers in the Ruhr.

The German resistance was finally broken on both fronts, and the only real question remaining involved how the Allies would divide the final tasks of conquest. American forces under General Eisenhower were moving eastward much faster than they had anticipated and possibly could have beaten the Russians to Berlin and Prague. The American and British high commands decided, instead, to halt the advance along the Elbe River in central Germany to await the Russians. General Bradley’s First Army met the westward advancing Soviet Army on April 25. The meeting of the Americans and the Russians at the Elbe symbolized the total destruction of Hitler’s Germany. Five days later, as the Russians stormed Berlin, Hitler committed suicide in his command bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery. On May 4, German forces in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Northwest Germany surrendered to the British. On May 7, 1945, the Germans formally surrendered to General Eisenhower, and the next day German officials in Berlin surrendered to the Soviets. May 8 was officially declared V-E Day for victory in Europe.

As the Allied armies advanced through German territory, the full extent of the Nazi horror became apparent. The eastern death camps in Poland had all been liberated by the Russians, but when the Americans and British entered western Germany, they encountered concentration camps such as Dachau, Bergen-Belsen (where Anne Frank died), and Buchenwald where the last survivors of the death camps had been marched in advance of the Russian invasion. The sight of the emaciated survivors and thousands of dead bodies made a lasting impression on the Allied forces. Life Correspondent George Rodger reported from the Belsen camp:

Many units were ordered to tour the liberated camps to reinforce the true horror of the evil that they had been fighting against. After the war, the Allies held a series of war crimes trials in Nuremberg, site of the great Nazi Party rallies of the 1930s, in which twelve top Nazi leaders were condemned to death. The most famous of the Nuremberg defendants was Herman Göring, one of Hitler’s earliest supporters. Several top Nazi leaders (Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler) had already committed suicide, and Göring too cheated the hangman by taking poison that had been smuggled to him in his cell. Many other perpetrators of Nazi atrocities were condemned to death in separate trials.

With the defeat of Hitler’s Germany, the conquest of Japan still remained. The American strategy was to hop from island to island until they were close enough to unleash the might of their airforce on Japan and then ultimately invade Japan itself. As the American forces advanced toward Japan they were forced to attack island after island, defended by fanatical soldiers willing to fight to the death for their emperor. The stubborn Japanese code of Bushido (the traditional code of the Japanese samurai, stressing honor, self-discipline, bravery, and simple living) maintained that surrender was the ultimate dishonor. Island by island, the Japanese were determined to make the Americans pay dearly for every mile that they advanced toward Tokyo. After the Battle of Midway in June 1942, the initiative had passed to the Americans but Japan still commanded an impressive empire. The struggle for Guadalcanal had pointed out the practical difficulty of the island hopping strategy. Japan did not plan to defeat the Americans, they simply hoped that the cost of defeating Japan would prove to be too great and that a peace settlement could be made that would enable Japan to keep most of its conquests of 1941-42.

The first of these island hops took place in November 1943 at the tiny islands of Tarawa. Located in the Gilbert Islands halfway between Hawaii and Guadalcanal, the largest island of Tarawa was less than three square miles in size. Its capture was a key prelude to the American attack on the Marshall Islands. Defending Tarawa were 4,500 top Japanese troops concealed in well-hidden defensive bunkers. The island’s commander bragged that a million men could not take the island in a hundred years. The ensuing fighting was brutal:

On the first day, of the 5,000 men who came ashore, 1,500 died or were wounded. Three days later the marines had secured the island. Of its 4,500 Japanese defenders, only 17 were captured alive. The U.S. suffered slightly more that 3,000 casualties or ten for every acre of the island. Within hours after the end of the fighting, American engineers, called Seabees, were building an airstrip from which to launch the next conquest.

Tarawa was just the first in a long series of bloody island conquests that awaited the Americans in the Pacific. Eventually an elaborate procedure was developed to minimize casualties:

In January 1944, U.S. forces landed in the Marshall Islands. Employing the lessons learned at Tarawa, Allied casualties were much lighter. At Eniwetok the Japanese garrison of 2,200 was wiped out at the cost of only 400 American casualties. The heavily defended island of Truk was not invaded but devastated by air as the U.S. sank thousands of tons of Japanese shipping and destroyed 275 aircraft. The success of the campaign in the Marshall Islands paved the way for the invasion of the Mariana Islands in June. During the invasion of the Marianas, the two countries engaged in the war’s biggest carrier battle—the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Knowing that the capture of the Marianas would bring the U.S. forces close enough to directly bomb the Japanese home islands, the Japanese threw their entire fleet at the Americans near the island of Guam. Admiral Toyoda, Commander in Chief of the Japanese fleet, said, "The fate of the empire rests on this one battle." By this time in the war, however, Japan was badly undermanned and underequipped. The U.S. outnumbered Japan seven to five in both battleships and carriers. More importantly, the Americans had twice the number of carrier planes. During the battle, U.S. submarines sank two Japanese carriers, torpedo aircraft sank another, and U.S. planes destroyed all but 35 of the 430 Japanese aircraft in what came to be known as the "Marianas Turkey Shoot." Japan would never recover from the loss of the majority of its trained pilots. At the same time as the Battle of the Philippine Sea, American marines were landing in the Marianas at Saipan. Saipan was a vital Japanese administrative center. 77,000 marines landed on June 15. Casualties were heavy the first two days as 4,000 marines fell. The invasion, intended to last three days, took three weeks. The U.S. suffered almost 50% casualties. Of the 32,000 Japanese defenders, less than 1,000 were captured alive. From Saipan, the huge U.S. B-29 bombers could reach Japan.

General MacArthur now prepared for his return to the Philippines. Prior to the invasion, the marines attacked the coral islands of Palau group in order to protect the eastern flank of the Philippine invasion. On one of these islands, Peleliu, the Japanese employed a new strategy. Instead of confronting the invaders on the beaches, they waited, well hidden, in inland bunkers. It took the marines over two months to subdue the resistance. Again, the casualties were horrendous. The Americans suffered over 6,000 casualties, which accounted for over 50% of the invasion force. The battle for the Philippines began in October 1944. In the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the Japanese fleet was dealt a fatal blow as the Americans sank three battleships and four carriers. The battle was the largest naval engagement in the history of the world as 282 ships took part in the fighting. With its defeat, the Japanese navy had failed in its objective to destroy transports landing American soldiers on the Philippine island of Leyte. For seven months the fighting raged in the Philippine jungles, but in February MacArthur triumphantly returned to the capital of Manila. On July 5, MacArthur announced that the campaign for the liberation of the Philippines had ended. Not only had the Japanese Imperial Army lost more than 400,000 of its best troops in the campaign (U.S. casualties were estimated at 14,000 dead and 48,000 wounded), but also with the fall of the Philippines Japan’s supply lines were now virtually cut. During the past year, American submarines had been wreaking havoc on Japanese shipping and crippling the nation’s domestic economy. By the summer of 1944, the already skimpy food rations for the Japanese people had been reduced by nearly a quarter and there was also a critical gasoline shortage.

By early 1945, the defeat of Japan seemed inevitable, but the war was not yet over. As American forces advanced steadily closer to the Japanese mainland, the imperial forces seemed only to increase their resistance. Fighting still continued in the Philippines long after the capture of Manila. During the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the Japanese had also unveiled kamikaze planes that deliberately crashed into American ships. The kamikaze ("divine wind" in Japanese) planes were loaded with explosives and sank a U.S. escort carrier at Leyte. Like the island defenders who fought to the death, the kamikaze pilots showed Japan’s willingness to employ almost any method to avoid defeat.

While the fighting raged in the Pacific, Allied forces also fought against the Japanese in China, Burma, and India. The war in China was seen as a vital method of pinning down sizable Japanese forces that otherwise could have been used against the island hopping strategy. The U.S. and Britain had supported Chaing Kai-shek’s forces in China since early in the war. Most of the aid was funneled north from India through Burma to Chaing’s forces in western China until this supply line was cut by the Japanese in mid-1942. As the British struggled to regain control of Burma, U.S. General Joseph H. Stilwell organized a five hour airlift to China over the forbidding Himalayan barrier, "the Hump," to supply the isolated Chinese forces and to bring Chinese troops out for Stilwell to train and arm. In 1943, Stilwell led Chinese, Indian, and a few American troops back through northern Burma, constructing a road and a parallel pipeline across the rugged mountains into China. The Burma Road finally opened in the fall of 1944. Efforts to defeat the Japanese in China were hampered, however, by the feud between Chiang and the Chinese Communists led by Mao Tse-tung. Rather than using his full resources against the Japanese, Chaing used many of his troops to maintain an armed frontier against the communists and stored weapons supplied from the Allies for later use against Mao. Chaing’s forces, trained and led by American advisors, finally mounted an offensive in the spring and summer of 1945. By this time, the Japanese on the mainland were so weakened that they had begun to relinquish their hold on China. As Japanese power waned, fighting between Chaing’s Chinese Nationalists and the Communists became more prevalent.

The most important outcome of the successful campaign of island hopping was that the American airforce was now in a position to take the war directly to the cities of Japan. In January 1945, General Curtis LeMay was placed in charge of the bombing of Japan which was being conducted from the Mariana Islands. LeMay increased the number of raids over Japan and also modified their tactics. Changing from the high-level precision bombing of industrial and military targets, LeMay favored nighttime low-level incendiary raids that set Japan’s cities ablaze. On February 25, over 150 B-29s carried out a huge incendiary attack on the Japanese capital. An entire square mile of central Tokyo was burned. The success of this raid encouraged others. On the night of March 9, 60% of Tokyo was destroyed in an incendiary raid. Two thousand tons of bombs were dropped from 200 planes in a two-hour period. Approximately 100,000 people died, and 16 square miles of the city were destroyed. In the next month LeMay’s tactics were used on the other major Japanese cities as well. An additional 100,000 civilians died in the firestorms, and millions were left homeless. By the end of July, the U.S. airforce had almost run out of targets. Japanese industry and transportation had been shattered, and all semblance of normal life for the Japanese civilians had ended as civilian casualties exceeded 800,000, including 300,000 deaths.

In the meantime, American marines moved in February to seize the tiny (8 sq. mile) volcanic island of Iwo Jima, only 650 miles from Tokyo, a potentially valuable base for future air strikes against Japan. American bombers could not carry full bomb loads from their bases in the Marianas, but this would be possible if the U.S. could capture Iwo Jima. In addition, bases on Iwo Jima would allow American fighter escorts to protect the bombing missions. For 76 days the U.S. bombarded Iwo Jima from the air. Again, the Japanese based their defenses inland. 21,000 Japanese troops dug into fortified caves and tunnels awaiting the invasion force. 60,000 marines landed on February 19. Capturing the island was supposed to take 19 days. It took 26. The volcanic ash made it too hot for the invaders to dig in. The Japanese defenses held the high ground atop Mount Suribachi, an extinct volcano, and trained their fire on the invaders (the eventual capture of Mt. Suribachi has been commemorated in the Marine Corps Memorial in Washington, D.C.):

The capture of Iwo Jima was the costliest battle in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps. Thirty percent of the American forces became casualties (7,000 killed and over 25,000 wounded). Only 200 of the 21,000 Japanese soldiers were alive at the battle’s conclusion.

The island of Okinawa was the next American target. Considered part of Japan itself, Okinawa was a vital base for the U.S. invasion of the Japanese home islands, only 350 miles to the north. Okinawa was defended by 77,000 Japanese soldiers as well as a civilian militia of over 20,000. Even small children were armed to resist the invaders. The American landings began on April 1 in the largest and costliest Allied action in the Pacific. Week after week the Japanese sent kamikaze suicide planes against American and British ships, sacrificing 3,500 of them while sinking 36 ships and damaging over 300 others:

Japanese troops on shore launched equally desperate attacks on the American lines. The United States and its allies suffered nearly 50,000 casualties on land and sea before finally capturing the islands in late June. Only 7,400 of the 110,000 Japanese troops survived. The American commander, Gen. Simon Buckner, was killed in the fighting, and the Japanese commander, Gen. Ushijima, committed hara kiri, disemboweling himself with his own sword. A decade after the war ended, huge piles of bleached bones could still be seen at the bottoms of the steep cliffs where much of the fighting took place.

The huge casualties suffered at Iwo Jima and Okinawa seemed just small precursors to those to be suffered in the future invasion of the Japanese home islands. Over 80,000 casualties had been suffered to capture Iwo Jima and Okinawa. How many would be required in the invasion of Japan? American casualty estimates for the invasion of Japan ranged from 190,000 to 1,000,000. As the war in Europe ended, American troops awaited their transfer to the Pacific to continue the war against Japan and American and British diplomats sought assurances from Stalin that he would send the Soviet Army into action against Japan as quickly as possible. American troops hoped to see "The Golden Gate in ‘48," but pessimists feared that the war against Japan could last as long as until 1950.

In August of 1939, Albert Einstein, a Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany, wrote President Roosevelt warning of the possibility that the Germans could create a bomb more powerful than anything previously imagined from a controlled nuclear reaction. The United States and Britain immediately began a race to develop the weapon before the Germans did.

In December 1942, American physicists produced a controlled chain reaction in an atomic pile at the University of Chicago, solving the first great problem in producing an atomic weapon. There remained the enormous technical problems of achieving the release of this power in a bomb. Over the next three years the government secretly poured nearly $2 billion into the so-called Manhattan Project, a massive scientific effort under the direction of General Leslie Groves. Hundreds of scientists, many of them not fully aware of what they were working on, labored feverishly to complete two complementary projects. At Oak Ridge, Tennessee, scientists worked on the production of fissionable plutonium, the fuel for an atomic explosion; and at Los Alamos, New Mexico, under the supervision of J. Robert Oppenheimer, others worked on the construction of a bomb that could employ the fuel. The war in Europe had ended by the time they were ready to test the first bomb (only later did they discover that the Germans had never come close to constructing a usable atomic device); however, the use of an atomic bomb on Japan was seen as a way to avoid the immense casualties that an invasion would bring.

In Japan, a struggle was emerging between the military, who advocated fighting to the last man, and civilian leaders who hoped for a negotiated peace. After the invasion of Okinawa, Emperor Hirohito had appointed a new premier, 78 year-old retired admiral Kantaro Suzuki, and gave him instructions to approach the Soviet Union in hopes that they could mediate peace terms. Despite the emperor’s wishes, Suzuki could not persuade the Japanese military leaders to give up the fight, and all of the Japanese leaders refused the Allied demands for unconditional surrender. On July 28, Suzuki proclaimed the Potsdam Declaration beneath contempt. Less than a week later, Truman gave the order to use the atomic bomb.

The first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Hiroshima, a city in southwestern Japan that was the home base of the Second Army, was about the size of Denver. Its many rivers made sighting from the air simple. Colonel Paul Tibbetts Jr. and the crew of the Enola Gay dropped a ten-foot uranium bomb dubbed "Little Boy" at 8:15 a.m.:

The mission report described Hiroshima as the largest city in the Japanese homeland (except for the religiously significant Kyoto) that had remained undamaged by the B-29 incendiary strikes. Although it contained the headquarters of the Second and Fifth Army Divisions, it had not been previously targeted because it "lacked significance in manufacture of war material, particularly aircraft production." At the time of the bombing, the city contained 43,000 soldiers and 280,000 to 290,000 civilians. The police department of Hiroshima calculated that 78,150 died in the bombing, 9,428 were seriously injured, 27,997 slightly injured, and 13,983 missing for a total of 129,558 total casualties.

It took the Japanese over two days to comprehend what had happened. The U.S., who had only one bomb remaining, was eager to make the Japanese believe that their supply was unlimited. On August 9, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Casualties were fewer than Hiroshima because the city was smaller (270,000) and the bomb missed the city center by three miles. Still, 38,000 were killed immediately and estimated total casualties approached 150,000.

Word of the Nagasaki bombing arrived at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo at the same time as a message that the Soviet Union had declared war on Japan. For seven hours the Japanese cabinet debated surrender. The military remained adamant in holding out for three conditions: that Japanese officers be allowed to disarm their own troops, accused war criminals to be tried in Japanese courts, and the terms of the enemy occupation be determined in advance. Clearly the U.S. would have turned down these terms. A second session began at 11:30 p.m. with the emperor present. The army leaders continued to argue for "one last battle on Japanese soil." Finally Suzuki made an unprecedented appeal to Hirohito. The emperor did not make political decisions. Hirohito, however, did not hesitate; he rose and told the conference that their only choice was to end the war immediately. He then left the room. It was not until 3:00 a.m. on August 10 that the Japanese cabinet finally issued a message accepting the terms of the Potsdam Declaration with the provision that the emperor would remain. President Truman accepted the preservation of the emperor’s position despite its exception to the pledge of "unconditional surrender." On August 15, the Japanese heard their emperor’s voice for the first time telling them to "endure the unendurable" and bow to the inevitable. On August 28, the U.S.S. Missouri sailed into Tokyo Bay to accept the Japanese surrender. Some Japanese were still determined to resist defeat. Kamikaze pilots plotted to attack the Missouri until Hirohito’s younger brother, Prince Takamatsu, reached their airfields just in time to persuade them to give up.

On September 2, 1945, Japanese officials signed the articles of surrender on board the Missouri:

The greatest war in the history of mankind had finally come to an end. In all, 61 countries with 1.7 billion people, three-fourths of the world’s population, took part. A total of 110 million persons were mobilized for military service, more than half of those by three countries: the USSR (22-30 million), Germany (17 million), and the United States (16 million). Fourteen million combatants died in the struggle. Many more civilians perished (estimates are over 24,000,000), especially in the Soviet Union (10,000,000), China (7,40,000), and Poland (4,200,000). The United States suffered only light casualties in comparison with some other nations, but the totals were frightful nevertheless: 274,000 dead, another 800,000 injured. After six years of war, the world optimistically looked forward to a hard-won peace, but already the world’s two strongest nations, the United States and the Soviet Union, were developing antagonisms toward one another that would darken the peace for many decades to come.