Operation Nordwind Research Paper

     The Battle of the bulge took place on December sixteenth 1944. More than a million men participated in this battle including some 600,000 Germans, 500,000 Americans, and 55,000 British which made it

There were great strides made in the development for better, more mobile Field Artillery during World War II. There was a great need for troops behind enemy lines which led to the use of a new, untested method known as Airborne Artillery. The ability to deploy Artillery units behind enemy lines changed the battlefield and set the tempo for the remainder of the battle. Operation Husky was a key campaign in World War II where the Allied Forces took Sicily from the Axis Powers. The German and Italian forces thought that they had predicted what the Allied Forces would attempt. The Axis Powers were actually take by surprise. The United States and Great Britain were the leading Allied Forces during World War II. The Invasion of Sicily was a large scale amphibious and airborne operation was followed by nearly six weeks of land combat and launched the Italian Campaign.

(Source B). The Allies had sent troops on the beach and they covered 50 miles of the land. This was the largest military assault in history (Source F). While the Americans were landing, strong tides swept them away and they did not have any cover to protect them. The number of Allies grew fast as incoming troops got involved. Two million men fought at Normandy. Germany could not send troops from France to assist since the tides were too strong for them to land, therefor they were not allowed to bring in more numbers from France. As Germany fought they began to lose the battle and the Americans pushed until they met with the USSR. This was the first time Germany was attacked. Most of the Nazis soldiers were just 16 years old and the Americans marched over them (Source C). The Germans fought a willing and difficult fight against the Allies. Airborne troops were shot down in Germany (Source

The shores were heavily “fortified” according to historians.Over 425,000 German and Allied troops were killed, wounded or went missing during the invasion. That includes over 209,000 killed from the Allied troops, with almost 37,000 deaths in the ground forces and about 16,714 people in the Air Force were killed.

General Pershing, in command of the U.S. 1st Army, set the rail line near Sedan, France as the main objective. This was a vital supply route for German forces (Stewart, 2005), and the direction of attack to the north of the front line through the Argonne Forest would expose the flank of German forces being attacked by the French from the west. Support for the American forces consisted of over 800 aircraft, nearly 190 tanks, and approximately 2,700 pieces of artillery, and over 600,000 men (Stewart, 2005).

The factors that made the Allied victory happen include the Germans beginning to effectively organize industrial production at the very least six months too late to give them a chance at victory. By the time they got the production to be swiftly working on weapons such as fighter planes, the Allies were in firm enough control of the air space. This meant that the Allied bombing prevented the German economy from reaching it’s full potential. Another flaw in the German production meant that tanks such as Tigers and Panthers, of which dominated tactical situations on the battlefield, had logistical and maintenance nightmares. If the Germans were to overcome their problems in production then it would have stood them in much greater stead, giving them an advantage over the Allies.

With German forces on the run following the Allied success at Normandy and the breakout and pursuit across France, Allied forces were staged to enter Germany in late summer 1944. Both Field Marshal Montgomery and General Bradley clamored to be given the priority of effort. General Eisenhower chose Montgomery’s Operation MARKET GARDEN as the plan for action. It called for airborne forces to open the route for a ground force to move more than sixty miles up a single road, ending up north of the Rhine River near Arnhem, Netherlands. By accomplishing this task, the German Ruhr industrial heartland would be within easy grasp. But the operation failed. The ground force

On the whole, this is the most significant point that will be discussed because simply, the Eastern Front is where the war was won and it also facilitated the landing of the allied troops in Normandy – D-Day. Stalin had been longing for the opening of the second front to draw German tanks and infantry away from the Eastern Front. The crucial aerial bombing meant that Germany had to withdraw anti-tank guns from the Eastern front and instead, use them to fight the British bombers in the sky. This was evident with the AA Defence System (88mm tank guns) which could no longer inflict damage upon the Red Army and the Soviets. Similarly, the Germans had to divert money and manpower (infantry) to provide a significant enough opposition to discourage the Allies from continuing with their long range offensives. As well as diversion of resources, the priority of the German manufacturers shifted greatly whereby the number of fighters increased on the German front from 1405 to 1650 in 1943-44, but decreased on the Eastern Front from 445 to 425 in 1943-44. The switch of bombers to fighters meant that troops on the front line did not have a protective air force. This, along with the minimalised production of weapons, reduced the war effort served by the Germans on the Eastern Front. The only fight which the Germans could put up there was defensive which inevitably, gave

7000 men, from Australia, Britain, and America came together as an allied force to stop the invasion of Northern France. Two Australians were put at the helm, and led the combined forces against German units in Le Hamel. For the allies to lose this battle meant that they would give vital positions which would help construct each steps of the German force invasion into France. Amiens, which was 17km away from Le Hamel, was the German unit’s next objective. The commanders, Ewen Sinclair Maclagan and John Monash led the troops with cunning tactics, such as combined arms, to penetrate through German frontiers.

The Meuse-Argonne Offensive, also know as the 100 Days Offensive, was the part of the grand Allied offensive in 1918 at the end of WW1. This battle involved 1.2 million American soldiers. The American’s objective was to break through the Hindenburg Line, which covered the length of the entire western front. The offensive consisted of a three-sided attack on the German’s Western Front. The BEF and the French Army were to engage the German lines at Flanders, while the British forces would take on the German troops at Cambrai. The American Expeditionary Forces numdering 400,000 men under the command of Gen. John J. Pershing, and the French Fourth Army under General Henri Gouraud’s role was the eastern most pincer of the multinational endeavor, the Argonne forest. The forest presented Gen. Pershing and his men some difficult challenges they were forced to overcome.

On 9 JUL 1943, the Allies initiated Operation Husky, one of the most significant combined operations of World War II (Birtle

The air battles of North Africa in early 1943 provided testing, refining, and critical adaptation to reach the superiority objective. The combination of strategic and tactical air forces brought a heavy dose of airpower to bear on German and Italian forces. North Africa became the live fire-training center for AAF air doctrine. In the early stages of North Africa, “the air arm was woefully ill-prepared to fight a desert war” . However, the willingness of leadership to quickly adapt to new environments and enemy strategy allowed the now coalition air force to radically change the war in the Mediterranean.

Operation Overlord The Allied position in early 1942 seemed unpromising. Hitler still had all the ground he had obtained in his blitzkrieg campaign of the previous five years and was gaining ground in Russia. The Nazis now also had a large foothold in North Africa and were ready to seize the oil fields of Arabia. Without large scale successful intervention by the Western Allies (Great Britain, America and Canada) it looked very likely that Nazi Germany would win the war.

The Allied forces essentially had more personnel, weaponry and munitions supplies. This, along with their ability to develop tactics and engage all elements of the battlefront, supported the perpetuation of ‘Total War’ and the allies’ victory.

The shortage of fuel was a issue to the allied success. The German military were defenseless while not very important oil provides. The air force was unable to keep up air superiority and therefore the armies were forced to abandon tanks and alike just because they'd no fuel. The bomber fleet disabled the train systems, destroying the German marshalling yards.