World War II

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5

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 on to 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. Afterwards, the Gestapo hunted down and slaughtered 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.

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6

Liberation of France

On July 24 the Americans and British were still confined in the Normandy beachhead, which they had expanded somewhat to take in Saint-Lô and Caen. Bradley began the break-out the next day with an attack south from Saint-Lô. 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 US 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 Falaise. The Germans held out until August 20 but then retreated across the Seine. On August 25 the Americans, in conjunction with Free French and Resistance forces under General Charles de Gaulle, 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 River Rhône. They made contact with Bradley's forces near Dijon in the second week of September.

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7

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 towards Belgium, the Americans towards the Franco-German border. Montgomery's troops seized Antwerp on September 3, and the first American patrols crossed the German border on September 11. However, the pursuit was ending. The German armies shattered in the break-out were being rebuilt, and Hitler sent as commander Field Marshal Walther Model, who had earned a reputation as the so-called “lion of the defence” on the Eastern Front. Montgomery had reached formidable water barriers—the Meuse and lower Rhine—and the Americans were coming up against the west wall, which had been built in the 1930s as the German counterpart to the Maginot Line. Although most of its big guns had been removed, the west wall's concrete bunkers and anti-tank barriers would make it tough to crack. Montgomery's attempt to force the barrier, the Battle of Arnhem in September, was a complete failure. The Allies' most serious problem was that they had outrun their supplies. Fuel and ammunition in particular were scarce and were being brought from French ports on the Channel coast over as much as 800 km (500 mi) of war-damaged roads and railways. Until the port of Antwerp could be cleared and put into operation, major advances like those in August and early September were out of the question.

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Warsaw Uprising

The Soviet offensive had spread to the flanks of Army Group Centre in July. On July 29 a spearhead reached the Baltic coast near Riga and severed Army Group North's land contact with the German main front. Powerful thrusts past Army Group Centre's south flank reached the line of the Wisła upstream from Warsaw by the end of the month. In Warsaw on July 31 the Polish underground Home Army commanded by General Tadeusz Komorowski (known as General Bor) staged the Warsaw Uprising. The insurgents, who were loyal to the anti-Communist exile government in London, disrupted the Germans for several days. The Soviet forces held fast on the east side of the Wisła, however, and Stalin refused to let US planes use Soviet airfields for making supply flights for the insurgents. He did, finally, allow one flight by 110 B-17s, which was made on September 18. By then it was too late; the Germans had the upper hand; and Komorowski surrendered on October 2. Stalin insisted that his forces could not have crossed into Warsaw because they were too weak, which was probably not true. On the other hand, the line of the Wisła was as far as the Soviet armies could go on a broad front without pausing to replenish their supplies.

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9

Defeat of Germany's Allies in the East

While the Soviet Union was letting the Warsaw Uprising run its tragic course, it was gathering in a plentiful harvest of successes elsewhere. An offensive between the Carpathian Mountains and the Black Sea, opened on August 20, resulted in Romania's asking for an armistice three days later. Bulgaria, which had never declared war on the Soviet Union, surrendered on September 9, Finland on September 19. Soviet troops took Belgrade on October 20 and installed a Communist government under Tito in Yugoslavia. In Hungary, the Russians were at the gates of Budapest by late November.