On 15 August a secondary Allied attack landed in the south of France and rapidly advanced northwards. It had taken two and a half months, not the planned three weeks, but the road to Paris was finally clear. With the Allies about to enter Paris, Hitler ordered his commander there, Major-General von Choltitz, to destroy much of the city. Choltitz refused and surrendered as, on 25 August, the French general, Philippe Leclerc, led the Allies into the city. They were ecstatically welcomed and the witch-hunt for collaborators began immediately. The following day, De Gaulle made his triumphant return to Paris, marching down the Champs-Elysées, declaring Paris ‘liberated by her own people with the help of the armies of France’; a rather fanciful interpretation of the facts. On 3 September, the Allies took Brussels to an equally joyous reception and by mid-September stepped foot on German soil for the first time since the war began.
But not everything went to plan. In September, Montgomery launched Operation Market Garden, the biggest airborne operation in history, to cut through the Siegfried Line, Germany’s line of frontier defences. In doing so, they planned to capture the bridges over the River Rhine, near the town of Arnhem, thereby opening the road to Berlin. Faulty radio transmitters severed communication between the British troops, and determined resistance by the Germans doomed the operation to failure.
On 16 December, with the Germans still retreating, Hitler launched a last-ditch counter-offensive through the Ardennes forest in Belgium in an attempt to cut the advancing Allied fronts into two, and to capture Antwerp, the Allies’ key supply point. Despite some initial success in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans soon lost the impetus and the Allies, having suffered grievous losses, surged forwards again, pushing the Germans back into the Reich.
German soldiers taken prisoner by American troops, April 1945
While his armies were being pushed further back, and in retaliation for the bombing of German cities, Hitler unleashed on Britain his long-awaited new super weapons – the V-1 (the ‘Doodlebug’) and V-2. These huge rockets – the V-2 flying faster than the speed of sound – caused much devastation and fear in south-east England. Nothing in Britain’s armoury could cope: radar, anti-aircraft guns, fighter planes were all rendered obsolete against these new weapons of terror. But, despite the damage, they arrived too late in the war to make an impact on its outcome.