Scandinavia took on ample significance to both Germany and Britain late in the winter of 1939-1940. The subsequent events in Scandinavian waters during the spring of 1940 would prove even more strategically significant following France's capitulation in June of 1940. The following will explain why.
Following the outbreak of the Second World War, a politically weakened Neville Chamberlain had brought one of his leading dissenters, Winston Churchill, into his cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty; in an attempt to silence Churchill's politically damaging critiques of Chamberlain's leadership.
The fall of 1944 ranks among the most difficult months the United States Army experienced in the entire 20th Century, if not her entire history. Along the center of the Allied front, along the German border near the medieval city of Aachen, General Hodges VII and V Corps endured one shattered rifle division after another. Aachen was the first significant German city the allies captured in the war, with a population of 165,000 people. Though the city itself was secured on October 21st heavy fighting raged on regardless; in the primeval Huertgen Forest blanketing the hills surrounding Aachen.
Following D-Day the Allied campaign to liberate France is often regarded as anticlimactic. What is often forgotten however, is that July of 1944 proved an anxious time for the Allied leadership. By July of 1944, enormous political pressure was mounting within the western democracies as the Allied military machine had bogged down in Normandy. Real fears regarding a return to the horrors of World War One style trench warfare swept through the Allied command.
On June 6, 1944 Anglo-American led armies successfully carried out the greatest amphibious invasion in history. Today, the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France is widely remembered as part of an inevitable march to victory over Hitler's armies; primarily because of the overwhelming numerical superiority the Allies enjoyed over the Wehrmacht. Often forgotten in the decades that have since passed is that on that fateful June morning so many years ago the Allied armies faced some of the longest odds in history.
Operation Overlord, the Allied code name for the invasion, had been years in
The first months of 1945 witnessed some of the European War's fiercest fighting. In spite of the fanatical defensive battle waged by the Wehrmacht, during March of 1945 the situation deteriorated rapidly for Hitler's Third Reich.
On October 9, 1939 Hitler issued Directive No. 6; a document, that among other things, advanced German plans to attack France later that same fall. Given the code name "Fall Gelb - Case Yellow" the plan Hitler's General Staff had prepared for invading France unimaginatively involved a virtual repetition of the World War One attack into Belgium; an attack to the west into Belgium in the first stage followed by a move to the southwest into France's interior in the second stage.
On March 24, 1945 USAAF (United States Army Air Force) Staff Sgt. Marvin Steinford's B-17 Bomber was hit by anti-aircraft fire over Hungary. As the plane fell to the earth Steinford bailed out - never to be seen again. Until now. After 66 years his remains have been found and he will finally be coming home to be put to rest near his home town of Keystone Iowa.
