The Western Front

The Western Front was the last of the four theatres to open and the shortest to run. By June 1944 the Wehrmacht had been fighting in the east for three years and had lost the strategic initiative there a year earlier. What the landings in France added was a second continental front that could not be closed down, which meant German reserves could no longer be moved from one crisis to another without creating a third.

The campaign had two distinct halves. From June to September 1944 it was a war of pursuit that outran its own supplies: the armies covered more ground in three weeks after Cobra than in the previous three months, and then stopped because the fuel and ammunition were still coming ashore over open beaches four hundred miles behind them. From October the war became a slow grind against fixed defences in bad weather, at Aachen, in the Hürtgen and along the Roer, until the Rhine crossings in March opened it up again.

Logistics decided more of it than tactics. Antwerp was taken intact on 4 September 1944 and could not be used for eighty-five days because the Germans held the Scheldt estuary. Cherbourg was demolished so thoroughly it handled almost nothing for a month. Almost every stall on this front traces back to a port that was not working.

The theatre also carried a political result that outlasted the military one. The line where the Western and Soviet armies met in the spring of 1945 became the line that divided Europe for the next forty-four years, and where the Western Allies stood in May 1945 was determined by decisions taken here between the Ardennes and the Elbe.

Each operation below has its own page with a mapped chronology at hour or day resolution, the commanders and decisions behind it, the materiel that shaped it, and the archive records behind every claim. Two are complete and the rest are in preparation.

The set is drawn to cover the whole front rather than only its famous parts. The Scheldt and the Hürtgen appear here because they cost more and decided more than their reputations suggest, and because a chronology of this theatre that runs from Normandy straight to the Ardennes leaves out the autumn in which the campaign was actually lost and regained.

The spine of this theatre is the United States Army in World War II series, the green books, which cover the European campaign volume by volume from cross-Channel planning through to the last weeks in Germany, and which are freely readable. Alongside them sit the British and Canadian official histories, the operational records at Kew and at the National Archives in Washington, and the photographic collections of the Imperial War Museums, NARA and the Bundesarchiv.

Front lines drawn on the map above are approximate and generalised from the monthly situation maps. They show the shape and pace of the campaign rather than survey positions, and the bypassed German garrisons on the Atlantic coast and at Dunkirk are omitted for legibility.