1945 VICTORY IN THE WEST
THE FINAL 100 BLOODY AND HARD-FOUGHT DAYS OF THE ALLIES’ ADVANCE ACROSS HOSTILE AND DEVASTATED TERRITORY
Author: Peter Caddick-adams Publisher: Penguin Random House Price: £30 Released: May 2022
In early 1945, US General Dwight D Eisenhower assembled seven Allied armies, totalling four million soldiers, to launch an invasion of the Western Reich. Military historian Peter Caddick-adams, in his sweeping and thoroughly documented narrative of that offensive, offers an in-depth account of the last 100 days of the Second World War. It is a tale rarely revealed in histories of the war’s final weeks which, as the author points out, tend to dwell on the 1944 D-day landings, the summer battles in Normandy, the autumn stalemate of Operation Market Garden in Holland and the winter campaign in the Ardennes forests.
The author bases his research on an extensive list of sources. These include hundreds of personal interviews from survivors of Auschwitz, army officers from both sides, reporters on the front line and even General Erwin Rommel’s son. There’s also material from numerous military museums, archives and secondary sources. The book is divided into three parts, chronicling first the campaign to push the Germans back to the River
Rhine, then the bitter fighting on the enemy’s homeland, and finally the struggle to achieve total victory.
Caddick-adams maintains that the threemonth advance across the Rhine into the German heartland is an episode often glossed over in a few paragraphs in military literature. For the Allied commanders, ever since Normandy there remained this obstacle of the Rhine, the greatest water barrier in Europe.
The end of the war at this stage is often painted as predetermined, as if it only remained to occupy newly won territory and mop up a few diehards. As the author brings to light, the reality of these operations was quite different. Much hard campaigning remained to be done and there was bitter fighting all along the front, right up to the last moments. Victory may have seemed to be within reach, but it was by no means a foregone conclusion. General George Patton, a hard-as-nails, seasoned campaigner, confided in his diary the fear that the Allies could still lose the war against the Germans who, in his estimate, were better fighters.
By March 1945, it was nearly ten months since the Allies had first set foot in northern France. Both sides had fought without respite since the initial landings on German-occupied soil and the Allied as well as the German armies were at near exhaustion. The 15 March setback at Utweiler, when the 7th Infantry suffered its worst day of the war, was a clear indication that any invasion of the Reich, even with the Germans seemingly on the run, was going to be a slow and costly affair. No one would have believed there was less than two months of fighting left before the demise of Nazi Germany.
Caddick-adams’ account of those last days shows that it was never going to be an uneventful, peaceful laying down of arms.
Even as General Bernard Montgomery was signing the German surrender document on 4 May, the Protestant chaplain of the Canadian Grenadier Guards and a lieutenant were killed while trying to bring in some wounded Germans. That same evening, south of the small German town of Rastede, Allied patrols had already set out to round up German troops from nearby woods. They were met with a fury of enemy fire that left killed and wounded on both sides. The three-month assault that dealt Nazi Germany its death blow was a violent battle to the last.
“ANY INVASION OF THE REICH, EVEN WITH THE GERMANS SEEMINGLY ON THE RUN, WAS GOING TO BE A SLOW AND COSTLY AFFAIR”