World War II European theater

The European theater of World War II broadly encompassed those land, sea, and air operations taking place between the Grand Alliance headed by the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, and the Axis powers of Germany and Italy and their allies, in northwestern, central, and eastern Europe, in the Atlantic Ocean, in North Africa and the Mediterranean Sea, and in the Soviet Union. In terms of intensity, the amount of manpower and national resources expended, and the number of casualties and the destruction incurred, World War II in the European theater dwarfed the war against Japan in the World War II Pacieic theater.

After a series of Axis blitzkrieg campaigns conducted between September 1939 and August 1942, the Germans and Italians dominated the European continent from Norway to the Mediterranean Sea (and also North Africa) and from the Bay of Biscay off the western coast of France to the breadth of European Russia. With Axis forces well entrenched, and opposing powers struggling either to survive or to rearm and mobilize, moves to liberate Europe from fascist rule came only following a long and costly war of attrition. When combined with the necessity of defeating Imperial Japanese forces in the Pacific, World War II became a global “total war” of unprecedented proportions.

At a post-PEARL Harbor conference in Washington, D. C., held between December 14, 1941, and January 15, 1942, the United States and Great Britain built upon earlier joint military staff talks held in August 1941. They developed a combined Anglo-American command, control, and logistical structure for their growing military forces as well as the broad outlines of a strategy to liberate the continent and defeat the Axis. An agreement was reached that the defeat of the European Axis, especially Nazi Germany, would take top priority in the years ahead, for Germany was considered the most powerful and dangerous of the Axis powers, requiring the greatest amount of effort to overcome. The Anglo-American talks also produced a statement of support for the Soviet war effort against Germany—the USSR was already receiving American assistance under Lend-Lease—and a decision to engage Axis forces as soon as possible on the continent itself, using all available air, land, and sea capabilities. Once the European Axis was defeated, Allied attentions would focus on defeating Imperial Japan. Until such time as Allied predominance in Europe was assured, however, the war against Japan would take secondary priority and would consist of holding actions and limited offensives. Five subsequent wartime conferences held between 1943 and 1945, involving American president Franklin D. Roosevelt, British prime minister Winston S. Churchill, and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin (known together as the “Big Three”) and their military and diplomatic staffs, further refined Allied strategy in consideration of ever changing events.

Yet even with the broad consensus gained in Washington, significant disputes remained among the Soviet, American, and British allies. The United States favored an immediate cross-Channel assault on Axis-occupied France to speed the ultimate goal of invading Germany and destroying its war-making capability. Soviet premier Stalin also favored the immediate opening of a second

ERont, both to ease pressure on the Red Army fighting in the east, and to gain reassurance of the commitment of the Western Allies to the Grand Alliance. Great Britain, however, mindful of American military inexperience, and of the bloody stalemate of the Western Front during World War I, opposed an early direct assault on “Fortress Europe,” preferring a peripheral approach until the Axis was sufficiently weakened to insure Allied success at the lowest possible cost.

While the Americans continued to favor a direct assault in either 1942 or 1943, building up the necessary manpower and war production needed to guarantee Allied superiority was going to take years. As a result, the Americans agreed to follow the British peripheral approach, while securing the Atlantic sea lanes, conducting a campaign of psychological

A U. S. armored column rolls through the streets of Palermo, Sicily, on July 22, 1943. (National Archives)

Warfare and aid to resistance movements, and mounting an ever more powerful strategic AIR POWER campaign against Germany. In spite of repeated calls by Stalin for an immediate second front, the British strategic view prevailed until 1944, when American war production and military power allowed the United States to determine overall strategy for the Western portion of the Grand Alliance.

As the Western Allies mobilized to conduct a total war, the decision was made to build upon British and Commonwealth efforts against Italian and German forces in North Africa (in the Western Desert in Libya and Egypt) that had commenced in late 1940, providing a foothold for the North African campaign. Anglo-American planning began immediately in the summer of 1942 to invade Vichy French territories in Northwest Africa, specifically in Morocco and Algeria, with a subsequent thrust toward Tunisia, thus placing Axis forces in a large east-west pin-cer movement. Once the Allies had defeated Axis forces in North Africa, they would be poised to launch an offensive on the European continent through the perceived “soft underbelly” of Italy or the Balkans.

Operation Torch, the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa, took place on November 8, 1942, with Anglo-American forces landing in Casablanca, Algiers, and Oran. The Anglo-American forces quickly overcame resistance by Vichy French forces and effected a cease-fire on November 10, but soon bogged down in the advance toward Tunisia due to poor weather, logistical difficulties, and the relative inexperience of American forces. This allowed the Germans to significantly bolster their armies in Tunisia, and to undertake offensive operations against the Allies—most notably at the Kasserine Pass, where U. S. Army forces were dealt a defeat in February 1943. Yet, with British Commonwealth forces pressing retreating Axis armies from the east, following the Second Battle of El Alamein in October 1942, the increased Allied pressure succeeded in forcing Axis troops into Tunisia, where they surrendered on May 13, 1943.

With preparations for the cross-Channel attack on France still ongoing, the Allies decided at the January 1943 Casablanca Conference to continue Mediterranean operations by invading Sicily. At the midsummer Quebec Conference, the Western Allies decided to continue this line of advance to the Italian mainland itself, having dismissed both the possibility of an invasion of France in 1943 and of other peripheral attacks in the Balkans. The conquest of Sicily by August provided the Allies with a major base for the September 1943 invasion of Italy. Earlier, in July, fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was ousted from power; Italy surrendered on September 8. While it was hoped that the Germans would withdraw beyond the Alps, German forces (with fascist Italian support) instead occupied the entire Italian peninsula. Following Anglo-American invasions on

September 3 and 9 at Salerno, Taranto, and Reggio, the Italian campaign turned into a drawn-out war of attrition through the remainder of 1943 and into 1944, moving northward up the Italian peninsula toward Rome. Attempts to break the German defensive belt known as the Gustave Line south of Rome failed even after the Anglo-American amphibious invasion at Anzio in January 1944.

In the meantime, the Soviet Red Army continued to battle for survival against the bulk of Axis military forces on the 1,800 mile-long eastern front. Following the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, on June 22, 1941, the Germans killed or captured 3 million Red Army troops in a series of stunning blitzkrieg operations that took them deep into the Ukraine, to the gates of Leningrad in the north, and to the outskirts of Moscow by December 1941. Weather, Axis logistical difficulties, and sizeable Soviet manpower reserves, however, slowed and then halted the German advance, while a massive counteroffensive on December 5, 1941, pushed German forces 100 miles away from Moscow. Although German forces again went on the offensive in the spring of

1942,  with the goal of capturing the Caucasus oil fields, a midsummer diversion to seize Stalingrad resulted in one of the longest urban battles of attrition in military history. German forces succeeded in capturing two-thirds of the city by late October, but a Soviet counteroffensive on November 19 succeeded in surrounding and isolating Axis forces, and a lengthy siege forced their surrender in late January

1943,  While the Germans would launch one further (yet limited and failed) offensive, in the summer of 1943 at Kursk, the tide of the war in the east had clearly turned, and growing Soviet military and industrial power promised to overwhelm the increasingly weaker Axis forces.

Planning for a second front in the west continued through 1943 with the decision made at the Teheran Conference in the fall of 1943 to launch the invasion in Normandy in May 1944. The subsequent invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, succeeded in establishing a beachhead, and was followed by a breakout in July. Combined with a second Anglo-American invasion in southern France in August 1944, the Allies succeeded in liberating the bulk of French territory by September 1, 1944. Although the Allies attempted to pierce German frontier defenses on the Siegfried Line, or West Wall, in the fall of

1944,  these attempts, as well as offensives in the Huertgen Forest, and an airborne operation in the Netherlands to seize Rhine River crossings, failed to produce the expected breakthroughs. In Italy, American forces liberated Rome on June 4, 1944, and, with British forces, pushed the Germans north of Florence before the offensive again stalled for yet another winter on the Gothic line. A mid-December 1944 second Ardennes offensive, known popularly as the Battle of the Bulge, produced temporary German gains against American forces in Belgium, but was quickly reversed by overwhelming Allied ground and air forces by mid-January 1945.

A major Soviet offensive in the east in June 1944, timed to coincide with the Normandy and French Riveria landings, sent Axis forces along the entire eastern front reeling, resulting in the liberation of European Russia, Poland, and the Balkans by September 1944. Red Army advances prompted the surrender of Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Finland by the late fall of 1944. By February 1945, Red Army forces were on the Oder River 50 miles from Berlin, and were besieging Budapest in Hungary, and were closing in on Austria. The final offensives in the west began in March 1945, with Anglo-American armies forcing multiple crossing of the Rhine River and capturing the German industrial Ruhr Valley by April. In eastern Germany, the final Soviet offensive annihilated the remaining German forces, and the city fell to Soviet forces on May 2, 1945. On the same day, Axis forces in Italy surrendered. In the west, German commanders signed the instrument of surrender in General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s headquarters in Rhe-ims, France, on May 7, 1945, in a ceremony repeated the following day, May 8, 1945, in Berlin. Victory in Europe Day, or V-E Day, was marked officially on May 8, 1945.

Further reading: Stephen E. Ambrose, The American Heritage New History of World War II (New York: Viking, 1997); Charles B. MacDonald, The Mighty Endeavor: The American War in Europe (New York: DaCapo Press, 1999); Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge, U. K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Alexander Werth, Russia at War, I94I—I94S (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1999).

—Clayton D. Laurie