Campaigns of World War II: Fall of the Reich is a military history of the Western European campaign from D-Day in June 1944 to the fall of Berlin in May 1945. Beginning with the Allied preparations for what would become Operation Overlord, from the initial discussions of Roosevelt and Churchill, to the deliberations and plans of Marshall and Brooke, and the subsequent appointment of commanders like Eisenhower, Montgomery and Ramsay, the book covers in detail the landings on the Normandy coast. Combining tactical coverage of events such as the severe fighting at Omaha and Pegasus Bridge, the Canadian success on Juno beach, and the 21st Panzer Division's aborted counterattack, with reporting of the reactions of Hitler and Rommel to the landings, the book provides an explanation of why the Allied advance ran out of steam, and a description of their struggle to escape the bocage hedgerows of Normandy.The US-led breakout in late July 1944 released Bradley and Patton's forces into the heart of France, and the liberation of Paris followed swiftly. A crumbling German defence led to Allied overconfidence and the resultant 'bridge too far' at Arnhem, but as the Allies approached the Rhine and the German border, resistance quickly stiffened. Hitler's last gamble, the attack through the Ardennes known as the Battle of the Bulge, brought temporary panic to the Allied ranks, but heroic stands at Bastogne and elsewhere, coupled with a German acute lack of petrol and the weather clearing to allow Allied aircraft to operate again, led to the defeat of the last Wehrmacht attack in the west. The final year of the war saw the Allies advancing as occupying forces into the heart of Germany, adopting Eisenhower's broad front strategy. Finally the book examines why the decision was made to allow the Red Army to occupy Berlin and remain on the western bank of the Elbe river.Part of a five-volume series on the Second World War written by prominent military historians, Fall of the Reich is a masterful account of the 1944-45 campaign in Western Europe that describes both the action on the front line and the decisions made behind the scenes that decided the fate of Nazi Germany.
As was its custom, on the evening of 5 June 1944 the BBC’s French-language service broadcast personal messages after the news. This evening there was an unusually large number–325–and it took more than an hour to get through all of them. One message– ‘I will bring the eglantine’ –was particularly significant. It was the order to the Resistance throughout northern France to implement Operation Vert, the scheme for rail sabotage. As the broadcast continued, other announcements activated Operation Tortue, the destruction of bridges and highways, Operation Bleu, the disruption of the electricity supply system, and Operation Violet, the cutting of telephone and telegraph links. Before midnight teams of the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) were moving into action. In the area of the Normandy beachheads, FFI intelligence chief Guilloum Mercader, a nationally famous cyclist who had come close to winning the Tour de France, pedalled at breakneck speed along coastal roads carrying orders from team to team. In Caen, stationmaster Albert Auge and his men set about disabling the locomotives in the city’s marshalling yards.
Farther west, teams commanded by a caféproprietor, AndréFarine, cut the telephone cables leading out of Cherbourg. Meanwhile other teams led by Yves Gresslin, a Cherbourg grocer, were dynamiting the railway lines linking Cherbourg, St Lo and Paris. In Brittany, small teams of the Deuxième Régiment des Chasseurs Parachutistes (RCP), the Free French equivalent of the British SAS, parachuted down to join more than 3500 Resistance activists. Before the night was out they had carved a swathe of destruction through eastern Brittany. They wrecked bridges and railway tracks, demolished electricity pylons, and established roadblocks covered by machine-gun and bazooka teams. They took every step to stop the 150,000 German troops in Brittany from reinforcing the beachhead quickly. Some 600km (375 miles) away, large sections of the lines radiating from Dijon, the hub of the railway network in eastern France, erupted in explosions; in all 37 cuts were made. Across the whole of France the first few hours of FFI operations succeeded in cutting the rail network in 950 places, causing the derailment of 180 trains.
Meanwhile wave upon wave of transport aircraft, many towing gliders, had been taking off from airfields in England. Around midnight, a stream of some 1270 aircraft, C-47s and old converted bombers like the Stirling and the Albermarle, and about 850 British Horsa and Hamilcar and American Waco gliders carrying 17,000 men, stretched from southern England to the coasts of Normandy. The first phase of the air landings, Operation Titanic, was under way just after midnight, as small groups of the SAS accompanied by some 500 dummy paratroops dropped behind Omaha, Gold and Juno beaches, well away from the actual landing zones. At Le Molay Littry, 10km (6 miles) behind Omaha Beach, the headquarters of the 352nd Division, the divisional commander, Major General Dietrich Kraiss, took fright and had his reserve regiment up and searching the woods south-east of Isigny.
At about the same time, American and British pathfinder aircraft, guided by skilled crews with sophisticated navigational equipment, were dropping paratroops equipped with flares and powerful lamps onto the landing zones. Twenty minutes later the aircraft and gliders of the American IX Troop Carrier Command carrying the 101st and 82nd Airborne banked to the south-east just north of the Channel Islands and passed over the western coast of the Cotentin Peninsula, climbing from 150 to 450m (500 to 1500 feet). They were detected by the radar of the 243rd Artillery Regiment, and a stream of anti-aircraft fire suddenly hit the transports, bringing down several C-47s. The pilots took evasive action, ducking, diving and disappearing into cloud banks, and within minutes the formations had broken up. Pilots, uncertain
