NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote
... Roosevelt supported the British, and the American military succeeded only (several months later) in getting an agreement that no more troops would be put into the Mediterranean area than were already there, all others being assembled in England for a cross-channel attack in 1944. Roosevelt gave his military another shock when he announced that nothing short of unconditional surrender would be accepted from any of the Axis powers. The policy was meant to reassure the Russians, who would have to wait at least another year for a full-fledged second front, but was likely also to stiffen Axis resistance. Air Raids on Germany As a prelude to the postponed cross-channel attack, the British and Americans decided at Casablanca to open a strategic air (bombing) offensive against Germany. In this instance they agreed on timing but not on method.
The British, as a result of discouraging experience with daylight bombing early in the war, had built their heavy bombers, the Lancaster's and Halifax, for night bombing, which meant area bombing. The Americans believed their B- 17 Flying Fortresses and B- 24 Liberators were armed and armored heavily enough and were fitted with sufficiently accurate bombsights to fly by daylight and strike pinpoint targets. The difference was resolved by letting each nation conduct its own offensive in its own way and calling the result round-the-clock bombing. The British method was exemplified by four firebomb raids on Hamburg in late July 1943, in which much of the city was burned out and 50, 000 people died.
American losses of planes and crews increased sharply as the bombers penetrated deeper into Germany. After early October 1943, when strikes at ball-bearing plants in Schweinfurt incurred nearly 25 percent losses, the daylight offensive had to be curtailed until long-range fighters became available. The Battle of Kursk Before the winter fighting on the eastern front ended in March 1943, Hitler knew he could not manage another summer offensive, and he talked about setting up an east wall comparable to the fortified Atlantic wall he was building along the western European coast. The long winter's retreat, however, had shortened the front enough to give him a surplus of almost two armies. It also left a large westward bulge in the front around the city of Kursk. To Hitler, the opportunity for one more grand encirclement was too good to let pass.
After waiting three months for more new tanks to come off the assembly lines, Hitler opened the battle at Kursk on July 5 with attacks north and south across the open eastern end of the bulge. Zhukov and Vasilyevsky had also had their eyes on Kursk, and they had heavily reinforced the front around it. In the war's greatest tank battle, the Russians fought the Germans nearly to a standstill by July 12. Hitler then called off the operation because the Americans and British had landed on Sicily, and he needed to transfer divisions to Italy.
With that, the strategic initiative in the east passed to the Soviet forces permanently. The Invasion of Italy Three American, one Canadian, and three British divisions landed on Sicily on July 10. They pushed across the island from beachheads on the south coast in five weeks, against four Italian and two German divisions, and overcame the last Axis resistance on August 17. In the meantime, Mussolini had been stripped of power on July 25, and the Italian government had entered into negotiations that resulted in an armistice signed in secret on September 3 and made public on September 8. On September 3 elements of Montgomery's British Eighth Army crossed the Strait of Messina from Sicily to the toe of the Italian boot.
The U. S. Fifth Army, under General Mark W. Clark, staged a landing near Salerno on September 9; and by October 12, the British and Americans had a fairly solid line across the peninsula from the Volturno River, north of Naples, to Termoli on the Adriatic coast. The Italian surrender brought little military benefit to the Allies, and by the end of the year, the Germans stopped them on the Gustav line about 100 km (about 60 mi) south of Rome.
A landing at Anzio on January 22, 1944, failed to shake the Gustav line, which was solidly anchored on the Like River and Monte Cassino. Allied Strategy Against Japan Strategy in the war with Japan evolved by stages during 1943. In the first, the goal was to secure bases on the coast of China (from which Japan could be bombed and later invaded) by British and Chinese drives through Burma and eastern China and by American thrusts through the islands of the central and southwestern Pacific to Formosa (Taiwan) and China. By midyear, it was apparent that neither the British nor the Chinese drive was likely to materialize. Thereafter, only the two American thrusts remained. Their objectives were still Formosa and the Chinese coast.
U. S. Advances in the Pacific In the Pacific, U. S.
troops retook Attu, in the Aleutians, in a hard-fought, 3 -week battle beginning on May 23. (The Japanese evacuated Kiss before Americans and Canadians landed there in August. ) The main action was in the southwest Pacific. There U. S. and New Zealand troops, under Admiral William Halsey, advanced through the Solomons, taking New Georgia in August and a large beachhead on Bougainville in November.
Australians and Americans under MacArthur drove the Japanese back along the East Coast of New Guinea and took Lae and Salamaua in September. MacArthur's and Halsey's mission, as set by the JCS in 1942, had been to take Rabaul, but they discovered in the Solomons that having command of the air and sea around them was enough to neutralize the Japanese Island garrisons and render them useless. Landings on Cape Gloucester, New Britain, in December, in the Admiralty Islands in February 1944, and At Emirau Island in March 1944 effectively sealed off Rabaul. Its 100, 000 -man garrison could not thereafter be either adequately supplied or evacuated. The central Pacific thrust was slower in getting started. The southwest Pacific islands were relatively close together; airfields on one could furnish support for the move to the next; and the Japanese navy was wary of risking its ships within range of land-based aircraft.
In the central Pacific, however, the islands were scattered over vast stretches of ocean, and powerful naval forces were needed to support the landings, particularly aircraft carriers, which were not available in sufficient numbers until late 1943. The first central Pacific landings were in the Gilbert Islands, at Makin and Tarawa in November 1943. Begin Island in the Tarawa Atoll, 117. 8 hectares (291 acres) of coral sand and concrete and coconut log bunkers, cost the 2 nd Marine Division 3000 casualties in three days. More intensive preliminary bombardments and larger numbers of amphibian tractors capable of crossing the surrounding reefs made the taking of Kwajalein and Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands in February 1944 somewhat less expensive. The Fourth Phase: Allied Victory After the Battle of Kursk, the last lingering doubt about the Soviet forces was whether they could conduct a successful summer offensive.
It was dispelled in the first week of August 1943, when slashing attacks hit the German line north and west of Kharkiv. On August 12 Hitler ordered work started on an east wall to be built along the Narva River and Lakes Pskov and Peipus, behind Army Group North, and the Des and Dnepr rivers, behind Army Groups Center and South. In the second half of the month, the Soviet offensive expanded south along the Donets River and north into the Army Group Center sector. On September 15 Hitler permitted Army Group South to retreat to the Dnepr River; otherwise it was likely to be destroyed. He also ordered everything in the area east of the Dnepr that could be of any use to the enemy to be hauled away, burned, or blown up. This scorched-earth policy, as it was called, could only be partially carried out before the army group crossed the river at the end of the month.
Henceforth, that policy would be applied in all territory surrendered to the Russians. Behind the river, the German troops found no trace of an east wall, and they had to contend from the first with five Soviet bridgeheads. The high west bank of the river was the best defensive line left in the Soviet Union, and the Soviet armies, under Zhukov and Vasilyevsky, fought furiously to prevent the Germans from gaining a foothold there. They expanded the bridgeheads, isolated a German army in Crimea in October, took Kyyiv on November 6, and stayed on the offensive into the winter with hardly a pause.
The Tehran Conference At the end of November, Roosevelt and Churchill journeyed to Tehran for their first meeting with Stalin. The president and the prime minister had already approved, under the code name Overlord, a plan for a cross-channel attack. Roosevelt wholeheartedly favored executing Overlord as early in 1944 as the weather permitted. At Tehran, Churchill argued for giving priority to Italy and possible new offensives in the Balkans or southern France, but he was outvoted by Roosevelt and Stalin. Overlord was set for May 1944. After the meeting, the CCS recalled Eisenhower from the Mediterranean and gave him command of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF), which was to organize and carry out Overlord.
The Tehran conference marked the high point of the East-West wartime alliance. Stalin came to the meeting as a victorious war leader; large quantities of U. S. lend-lease aid were flowing into the Soviet Union through Murmansk and the Persian Gulf; and the decision on Overlord satisfied the long-standing Soviet demand for a second front. At the same time, strains were developing as the Soviet armies approached the borders of the smaller eastern European states. In May 1943 the Germans had produced evidence linking the USSR to the deaths of some 11, 000 Polish officers found buried in mass graves in the Katy Forest near Smolensk.
Stalin had severed relations with the Polish exile government in London, and he insisted at Tehran, as he had before, that the postwar Soviet-Polish boundary would have to be the one established after the Polish defeat in 1939. He also reacted with barely concealed hostility to Churchill's proposal of a British-American thrust into the Balkans. German Preparations for Overlord Hitler expected an invasion of northwestern Europe in the spring of 1944, and he welcomed it as a chance to win the war. If he could throw the Americans and British off the beaches, he reasoned, they would not soon try again. He could then throw all of his forces, nearly half of which were in the west, against the USSR. In November 1943 he told the commanders on the eastern front that they would get no more reinforcements until after the invasion had been defeated.
In January 1944 a Soviet offensive raised the siege of Leningrad and drove Army Group North back to the Narva River-Lake Peipus line. There the Germans found a tenuous refuge in the one segment of the east wall that had been to some extent fortified. On the south flank, successive offensives, the last in March and April, pushed the Germans in the broad stretch between the Poles " ye Marshes (Pripyat' Marshes) and the Black Sea off of all but a few shreds of Soviet territory. The greater part of 150, 000 Germans and Romanians in Crimea died or passed into Soviet captivity in May after a belated sealing failed to get them out of Sevastopol'. On the other hand, enough tanks and weapons had been turned out to equip new divisions for the west and replace some of those lost in the east; the air force had 40 percent more planes than at the same time a year earlier; and synthetic oil production reached its wartime peak in April 1944. The Normandy Invasion On June 6, 1944, D-Day, the day of invasion for Overlord, the U.
S. First Army, under General Omar N. Bradley, and the British Second Army, under General Miles C. Dempsey, established beachheads in Normandy, on the French channel coast.
The German resistance was strong, and the footholds for Allied armies were not nearly as good as they had expected. Nevertheless, the powerful counterattack with which Hitler had proposed to throw the Allies off the beaches did not materialize, neither on D-Day nor later. Enormous Allied air superiority over northern France made it difficult for Rommel, who was in command on the scene, to move his limited reserves. Moreover, Hitler became convinced that the Normandy landings were a feint and the main assault would come north of the Seine River.
Consequently, he refused to release the divisions he had there and insisted on drawing in reinforcements from more distant areas. By the end of June, Eisenhower had 850, 000 men and 150, 000 vehicles ashore in Normandy. The Soviet Reconquest of Belorussia The German eastern front was quiet during the first three weeks of June 1944. Hitler fully expected a Soviet summer offensive, which he and his military advisers believed would come on the south flank. Since Stalingrad the Soviets had concentrated their main effort there, and the Germans thought Stalin would be eager to push into the Balkans, the historic object of Russian ambition.
Although Army Group Center was holding Belorussia-the only large piece of Soviet territory still in German hands-and although signs of a Soviet buildup against the army group multiplied in June, they did not believe it was in real danger. On June 22 - 23, four Soviet army groups, two controlled by Zhukov and two by Vasilyevsky, hit Army Group Center. Outnumbered by about ten to one at the points of attack, and under orders from Hitler not to retreat, the army group began to disintegrate almost at once. By July 3, when Soviet spearheads coming from the northeast and southeast met at Minsk, the Belorussian capital, Army Group Center had lost two-thirds of its divisions.
By the third week of the month, Zhukov's and Vasilyevsky's fronts had advanced about 300 km (about 200 mi). The Soviet command celebrated on July 17 with a day-long march by 57, 000 German prisoners, including 19 generals, through the streets of Moscow. The Plot Against Hitler A group of German officers and civilians concluded in July that getting rid of Hitler offered the last remaining chance to end the war before it swept onto German soil from two directions. On July 20 they tried to kill him by placing a bomb in his headquarters in East Prussia.
The bomb exploded, wounding a number of officers-several fatally-but inflicting only minor injuries on Hitler. Afterward, the Gestapo hunted down everyone suspected of complicity in the plot. One of the suspects was Rommel, who committed suicide. Hitler emerged from the assassination attempt more secure in his power than ever before. The Liberation of France As of July 24 the Americans and British were still confined in the Normandy beachhead, which they had expanded somewhat to take in Saint-L^o and Caen. Bradley began the breakout the next day with an attack south from St-L^o.
Thereafter, the front expanded rapidly, and Eisenhower regrouped his forces. Montgomery took over the British Second Army and the Canadian First Army. Bradley assumed command of a newly activated Twelfth Army Group consisting of U. S.
First and Third armies under General Courtney H. Hodges and General George S. Patton. After the Americans had turned east from Avranches in the first week of August, a pocket developed around the German Fifth Panzer and Seventh armies west of False. The Germans held out until August 20 but then retreated across the Seine. On August 25 the Americans, in conjunction with General Charles de Gaulle's Free French and Resistance forces, liberated Paris.
Meanwhile, on August 15, American and French forces had landed on the southern coast of France east of Marseille and were pushing north along the valley of the Rh^one River. They made contact with Bradley's forces near Dijon in the second week of September. Pause in the Western Offensive Bradley and Montgomery sent their army groups north and east across the Seine on August 25, the British going along the coast toward Belgium, the Americans toward the Franco-German border.
Free research essays on topics related to: army group, soviet union, british and americans, americans and british, eastern front
Research essay sample on Americans And British British And Americans
