World War 2
Race to the Rhine
On the 15th of August 1944 the Allies landed in the south of France, capturing Toulon and Marseilles two weeks later. In the north they raced into the Low Countries, liberating Brussels on the 3rd of September. On the 11th of September American forces crossed the German boarder near Aachen.
Hopes that the war would be over by Christmas were soon dashed. A bold airborne attempt to turn the northern end of the West Wall, the German defensive line running along the Dutch and French boarders, came to grief at Arnhem. The British failed to clear the Scheldt estuary, which denied Allied shipping the use of the vital port of Antwerp until November 1944. In the great forests on the German frontier, the Reichswald and the Hurtgen, there was fighting reminiscent of the First World War.
In December 1944 Hitler launched his last great offensive in the West. It fell in the Ardennes, the scene of his triumph in 1940, but this time he lacked the resources to engineer a second Dunkirk. In March 1945 the Allies closed upto the Rhine, and in a series of assault crossings broke into the heartland of the Reich, isolating the German Group Army B in the ruins of the industrial region of the Ruhr.