![]() ![]() Bradley’s northern flank was secured by the U.S. Omar Bradley’s 12th Army Group, consisting of Lt. Dwight Eisenhower’s final offensive was led by the most powerful forces in American military history: Gen. It was the perfect type of campaign for the U.S. For the Americans, it was an opportunity to use their greatest strengths, mechanization and firepower, to overwhelm the Wehrmacht once and for all. The curtain went up on Nazi Germany’s last act with the capture of the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen on March 7, 1945, which opened the way for the Allies’ final thrust. In fact, some GIs, witnessing the atrocities committed against their own and against those held in the concentration camps they liberated, would find themselves “raging inside with boiling hatred,” as one GI recalled, and met violence and cruelty with violence and cruelty. ![]() The scenes that purport to show an easy, quick, and Homerian victory-Sherman tanks rumbling through destroyed German cities, Hitler’s suicide, the Soviet banner flying above the ruined Reichstag-have become well established in the popular imagination.įor the American GIs entering the heart of Germany, however, April 1945 was a month filled with some of the most brutal fighting of the war, when the horrors of the Nazi regime were finally revealed to the world. The last weeks of World War II in Europe have, with a handful of exceptions, long been perceived as the pursuit of shattered German armies by the victorious Western Allies, the smashing of the last Nazi strongholds by the Soviet hammer. The End of the Good War - Germany, April 1945 Close ![]()
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