SHAEF
“In the years to come everyone will remember Arnhem, but no one will remember that two American divisions fought their hearts out in the Dutch canal country,” wrote U.S. Read more
SHAEF
Within his reinforced concrete bunker, 50 feet below the garden of the New Reichs Chancellery on Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse, German dictator Adolf Hitler, his soon-to-be bride Eva Braun, and several hundred friends, SS guards, and staff members could feel the concussion and hear the unending drumroll of thousands of Soviet artillery shells reducing the already-battered capital city of the Third Reich to unrecognizable rubble. Read more
SHAEF
By the autumn of 1944, German resistance in the West was quickly crumbling as the British and Americans approached the German border 233 days ahead of schedule. Read more
SHAEF
Operation Bolero, the marshaling of Allied forces for the planned 1944 invasion of Normandy, was in full swing by late 1943, and much of England had been turned into a great armed camp. Read more
SHAEF
On January 17, 1945, as Allied forces prepared to descend on Germany itself and put an end to the war in Europe, an American tank battalion disappeared. Read more
SHAEF
On a cold March evening in the Goldenrod Café in West Point, Nebraska, Mary Timmermann, a waitress there, picked up the telephone receiver when her boss told her it was Omaha calling long distance for her. Read more
SHAEF
“The lieutenant said for everyone to lay your arms down,” a fellow paratrooper told Pfc. Bob Nobles, who had been fighting for six grueling days in the hedgerows following his unit’s jump into Normandy. Read more
SHAEF
The night of June 5, 1944, and the morning of June 6 were without a doubt some of the most pivotal hours in the history of the 20th century. Read more
SHAEF
The road to Fort Driant began for the United States Third Army when it landed on Utah Beach at 3 pm on August 5, 1944. Read more
SHAEF
In an August 14, 1944, General Bernard L. Montgomery was facing a manpower crisis, unable to drive the Germans out of Caen. Read more
SHAEF
By Michael D. Hull
August 1944 saw a rosy mood of optimism and self-deception sweep through the Allied high command in France as a result of the sudden, dramatic end to the campaign in Normandy. Read more
SHAEF
By the late summer of 1944, the Third Reich was almost surrounded. Two years earlier Adolf Hitler had ground 10 European countries under his heel along with vast expanses of North Africa and Soviet Russia. Read more
SHAEF
In December 1944, the Ardennes front or “ghost front” was an area where either veteran Allied units rotated in to rest and recover from terrible combat losses or where new, untested units arrived to gather some combat experience from the minor skirmishes that would occasionally flare up. Read more
SHAEF
Operation Overlord, the cross-Channel attack that hit the Nazi-occupied beaches of Normandy in 1944, was the culmination of a grand strategy adopted early in the war, followed sporadically during the years of conflict, and aimed at defeating Hitler’s Reich by striking directly at Germany by invasion. Read more
SHAEF
In May 1945—70 years ago—the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) sent out a terse, unemotional, 15-word communiqué: “The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 0241 local time, May 7, 1945.” Read more
