On to Berlin!

On 25 August 1944 the Allied forces, led by General de Gaulle's Free French troops, liberated Paris from the Germans. The liberation of Belgium followed in September. Nonetheless, German resistance was still fierce. An attempt by the British in September to seize a vital bridge across the Rhine at Arnhem behind German lines went badly wrong. Of the 10,000 British paratroops dropped by air, only 2400 managed to escape death or capture by the Germans. In December 1944, Hitler launched the final German offensive of the war in the Ardennes, known as 'the Battle of the Bulge'. The offensive only succeeded in delaying the invasion of Germany by six weeks.

At the end of April 1945, Russian forces moving east met up with American forces moving west in Germany. Russian troops entered Berlin in the same month and on 30 April, Hitler shot himself. On 8 May Germany surrendered. The war in Europe was over.

Neil Demarco: The era of the Second World War; Oxford University Press, 1993/2000, page 46