The Western Front

6 June 1944 to 8 May 1945 · France, the Low Countries and Germany

Opened late and closed fast. Eleven months from a beach in Normandy to the Elbe, fought to force a permanent division of German strength between two fronts and to put Western armies in central Europe before the war ended.

“Into the Jaws of Death” · CPhoM Robert F. Sargent, US Coast Guard · NARA 26-G-2343 · Public domain · Source

DURATION: 337 daysFrom the Normandy landings to the German surrender
FRONTAGE AT ITS WIDEST: 450 milesNorth Sea to the Swiss border, winter 1944
ALLIED DIVISIONS: Around 90American, British, Canadian, French and Polish by spring 1945
ALLIED CASUALTIES: ~780,000Killed, wounded and missing in north-west Europe
OUTCOME: Allied victoryUnconditional surrender, 8 May 1945

Marker affiliation Allied Axis Other / contested

Map layers

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The Front

11 months from Normandy to the Elbe, 2.5 million Allied troops landed

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.

Operations

Eleven linked campaign and logistics pages, Normandy to the Elbe

Eleven operations and logistics pages are linked directly from this theatre rail, from the Normandy landings to the Ruhr Pocket. The Liberation of Paris remains nested under Overlord but is surfaced here as its own Western Front event because it marks the political and operational culmination of the pursuit across France. Overlord also opens into focused pages covering Pegasus Bridge, Omaha, Pointe du Hoc and Cobra.

6 June to 30 August 1944

Operation Overlord

The Allied invasion of north-west Europe. An assault across fifty miles of defended coast, sustained without a captured port, followed by eleven weeks in the bocage that ended with the German army in France destroyed west of the Seine.

Fifty-five entries at hour and day resolution, from Stagg's forecast on 3 June to the Seine crossings on 30 August.

12 August 1944 to 7 August 1945

Operation PLUTO

PLUTO's engineering development began in 1942, but its Western Front operational story begins with the first full Channel lay on 12 August 1944. The long Isle of Wight–Cherbourg system failed after delivering less than one million gallons.

The shorter Dungeness–Boulogne system became useful during the winter and spring of 1945. Across the campaign PLUTO supplied about eight per cent of British cross-Channel petroleum, after ports, tankers and conventional pipelines had already carried the immediate burden.

15 August to 14 September 1944

Operation Dragoon

The second invasion of France, landing between Toulon and Cannes against defences stripped to feed Normandy. Churchill opposed it to the last, arguing for the Balkans instead.

Marseille and Toulon were captured within a fortnight and became the most productive Allied ports in France, handling more tonnage than the Normandy beaches. The French First Army came into the line here.

19 to 26 August 1944

The Liberation of Paris

An uprising that began on 19 August turned Paris into a battlefield the Allied armies had planned to bypass. Police, FFI fighters and civilians seized buildings and raised nearly 600 barricades across Paris and its suburbs while German forces held scattered strongpoints.

Leclerc's 2e Division Blindée entered the capital on 24 and 25 August as the US 4th Infantry Division advanced on another axis. Dietrich von Choltitz signed the surrender on 25 August; de Gaulle's procession the following day made the liberation a military victory and a restoration of French state authority.

17 to 26 September 1944

Operation Market Garden

The largest airborne operation yet mounted, laid along sixty-four miles of a single road, to seize a chain of bridges and put an army across the Lower Rhine before winter.

Eight of the nine bridges were taken. Thirty-four entries covering the plan, the drop, the corridor and the withdrawal across the Nederrijn.

19 September 1944 to 10 February 1945

Aachen and the Hürtgen Forest

Aachen was the first German city taken by the Western Allies, reduced street by street in October. South of it, the Hürtgen Forest became the longest single battle the US Army has ever fought.

Around 33,000 American casualties in dense conifer forest with almost no room to manoeuvre, for objectives that were never clearly worth the cost.

2 October to 8 November 1944

The Battle of the Scheldt

Antwerp fell intact on 4 September and could not be used for eighty-five days because the Germans held both banks of the estuary leading to it. First Canadian Army cleared them in six weeks of amphibious and polder fighting on flooded ground.

Around 12,900 Allied casualties. The first convoy reached Antwerp on 28 November, and the supply crisis that had stopped the pursuit was over.

16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945

The Battle of the Bulge

The last German offensive in the west, launched under cloud that grounded Allied aircraft, aimed at Antwerp and at splitting the Anglo-American front. Three armies attacked through the thinly-held Ardennes.

The defence of St Vith and Bastogne broke the timetable. When the weather cleared on 23 December the offensive stalled short of the Meuse, having spent Germany's last mobile reserves.

20 January to 21 March 1945

The Rhineland and Alsace Battles

The final clearing of the Rhine's west bank ran on several axes: the Colmar Pocket in Alsace, Veritable through the Reichswald, Grenade across the Roer, and the March offensive through the Saar-Palatinate. These battles destroyed or displaced much of the German force still holding ground west of the river.

The seizure of the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen on 7 March happened while west-bank operations were still continuing elsewhere. The river crossings are therefore shown separately on this theatre rail even though the two phases overlap by two weeks.

7 to 28 March 1945

The Rhine Crossings

The Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen was found standing on 7 March and seized in a rush, creating an unplanned bridgehead while fighting continued on the west bank farther south. Patton's Third Army made an assault crossing near Oppenheim on 22 March.

Operation Plunder began on the night of 23–24 March on the Lower Rhine, followed by Varsity on 24 March. By the end of the month multiple bridgeheads had broken the river barrier and the campaign had shifted decisively into central Germany.

1 April to 8 May 1945

The Ruhr Pocket and the Elbe

First and Ninth Armies closed behind Army Group B at Lippstadt on 1 April, encircling around 317,000 men in the industrial heart of Germany. It was the largest capitulation of the war in the west, and Model shot himself rather than surrender.

The advance ran on to the Elbe and stopped there by agreement while the Red Army took Berlin. That halt line became the border of divided Europe.

Sources & Archives

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.

Cross-Channel Attack, Gordon A. HarrisonUS Army Center of Military History
Breakout and Pursuit, Martin BlumensonUS Army Center of Military History
The Siegfried Line Campaign, Charles B. MacDonaldUS Army Center of Military History
The Ardennes: Battle of the Bulge, Hugh M. ColeUS Army Center of Military History
The Last Offensive, Charles B. MacDonaldUS Army Center of Military History
The Victory Campaign: operations in north-west Europe, 1944 to 1945, C. P. StaceyDirectorate of History, Canadian Forces
Operational records of 21st Army Group and Second Army, WO 171 and WO 205The National Archives, Kew
Records of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, Record Group 331US National Archives and Records Administration
North-west Europe 1944 to 1945, photograph and film collectionsImperial War Museums
American cemeteries and battlefield interpretation in north-west EuropeAmerican Battle Monuments Commission

Operation chronologyDates, locations and sourced event summaries

Date	Event	Location	Summary
6 June to 30 August 1944 · 01	Operation Overlord	Normandy	The Allied invasion of north-west Europe. An assault across fifty miles of defended coast, sustained without a captured port, followed by eleven weeks in the bocage that ended with the German army in France destroyed west of the Seine.
12 August 1944 to 7 August 1945 · 10	Operation PLUTO	The English Channel	PLUTO's engineering development began in 1942, but its Western Front operational story begins with the first full Channel lay on 12 August 1944. The long Isle of Wight–Cherbourg system failed after delivering less than one million gallons.
15 August to 14 September 1944 · 02	Operation Dragoon	Provence and the Rhône	The second invasion of France, landing between Toulon and Cannes against defences stripped to feed Normandy. Churchill opposed it to the last, arguing for the Balkans instead.
19 to 26 August 1944 · 11	The Liberation of Paris	Paris, France	An uprising that began on 19 August turned Paris into a battlefield the Allied armies had planned to bypass. Police, FFI fighters and civilians seized buildings and raised nearly 600 barricades across Paris and its suburbs while German forces held scattered strongpoints.
17 to 26 September 1944 · 03	Operation Market Garden	The Netherlands	The largest airborne operation yet mounted, laid along sixty-four miles of a single road, to seize a chain of bridges and put an army across the Lower Rhine before winter.
19 September 1944 to 10 February 1945 · 05	Aachen and the Hürtgen Forest	Aachen and the Hürtgen Forest	Aachen was the first German city taken by the Western Allies, reduced street by street in October. South of it, the Hürtgen Forest became the longest single battle the US Army has ever fought.
2 October to 8 November 1944 · 04	The Battle of the Scheldt	The Scheldt estuary	Antwerp fell intact on 4 September and could not be used for eighty-five days because the Germans held both banks of the estuary leading to it. First Canadian Army cleared them in six weeks of amphibious and polder fighting on flooded ground.
16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945 · 06	The Battle of the Bulge	The Ardennes	The last German offensive in the west, launched under cloud that grounded Allied aircraft, aimed at Antwerp and at splitting the Anglo-American front. Three armies attacked through the thinly-held Ardennes.
20 January to 21 March 1945 · 07	The Rhineland and Alsace Battles	Alsace, the Reichswald, the Roer and Saar-Palatinate	The final clearing of the Rhine's west bank ran on several axes: the Colmar Pocket in Alsace, Veritable through the Reichswald, Grenade across the Roer, and the March offensive through the Saar-Palatinate. These battles destroyed or displaced much of the German force still holding ground west of the river.
7 to 28 March 1945 · 08	The Rhine Crossings	Remagen, Oppenheim and the Lower Rhine	The Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen was found standing on 7 March and seized in a rush, creating an unplanned bridgehead while fighting continued on the west bank farther south. Patton's Third Army made an assault crossing near Oppenheim on 22 March.
1 April to 8 May 1945 · 09	The Ruhr Pocket and the Elbe	The Ruhr and the Elbe	First and Ninth Armies closed behind Army Group B at Lippstadt on 1 April, encircling around 317,000 men in the industrial heart of Germany. It was the largest capitulation of the war in the west, and Model shot himself rather than surrender.

Image and film rights. Material credited to the US Army Signal Corps, US Navy, US Coast Guard and NARA are works of the United States federal government and are in the public domain. Material credited to the Bundesarchiv is licensed CC BY-SA 3.0 DE and reproduced with attribution. Material credited to the Imperial War Museums is reproduced under the IWM Non-Commercial Licence.