The War in Pictures VI. [antikvár]

YEAR OF VICTORY The first days of the sixth and final year of the Second World War saw the powerful Allied armies in the West racing across France and Belgium towards the frontier of Germany along the Rhine. Very considerable progress had been made in the three eventful months since D-Day, when the Anglo-American forces made their initial landing on the northwest coast of Nazi-occupied Europe. Once the hard core of the enemy's resistance had been broken and a break-through achieved by the decisive victory around Caen, the Allied drive eastwards from the Normandy bridgehead gained rapid momentum. Paris was freed on 25 August, and little more than a week later, on 3 September, the British Second Army liberated the heroic Belgian capital which had suffered under the cruel German occupation for more than four years. Although there was still a good deal of hard and bitter fighting to come, through a winter which brought extreme weather conditions, it was now clearly evident that the fate of Nazi Germany was sealed. Nor could the promised invasion of Hitler's " impregnable " Reich be much longer delayed, in spite of all the cunning tactics and surprises that the enemy might use. Not only had the German war leaders to face imminent invasion by six brilliantly led and well-equipped armies advancing from the west of the Rhine, but mighty new blows were being prepared by the Red Army in the east, particularly against East Prussia, the traditional home of German militarism. Meanwhile, the German people themselves, whose morale had been greatly weakened by a long series of military defeats and greater privations at home, were suffering the most tremendous air assault of the war, carried on by the powerful Allied air forces operating from bases not only in Britain but on the Continent as well. The heavy and continuous bombing of centres of war production, communications and garrison and fortified towns throughout the Reich played a foremost part in the glorious victory of Allied arms and saved many thousands of British and