On Aug. 1, Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army exploded out of the Cotentin Peninsula and charged into the Avranches corridor in pursuit of the crumbling German forces. “Let my killers through!” Patton roared as he personally untangled massive traffic jams to free his tanks. (U.S. Army photo by Julie Piron)

Six months after D-Day, Battle of the Bulge brings Europe close to war end

The Allies Hit the Beaches

When the Allied armies landed in Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944, one of the most critical events of World War II – the liberation of Western Europe – began. The plan, more than two years in the making, had to succeed, if the Allies were to win the war against Nazi Germany. The invasion remains to this day the largest amphibious operation ever mounted with more than 6,000 vessels from battleships to landing craft involved.

After massive naval and aerial bombardments, 154,000 American, British and Canadian Soldiers, including 24,000 arriving by parachute and glider, assaulted Hitler’s Fortress Europe. Although taken by surprise, the German forces quickly recovered and began to resist. The fight to breakout from the beachhead was to be a long, bloody affair, but it did come. In the three weeks succeeding D-Day, the allied navies had ferried no fewer than a million men ashore together with 560,000 tons of supplies – enough to fill a freight train 190 miles long. No army could stand against such a force so well-supplied.

By July the Allied forces had fought their way off the beaches and were prepared to charge full-throttle east. The German Seventh Army was being crushed by the weight of unending Allied ground and air attacks.

Third Army moved through France at a 40-mile-a-day clip, seizing all the roads and gathering up tens of thousands of prisoners. The Battle for Normandy ended in a great Allied victory with more than 40 German divisions destroyed. Today Patton’s 716-mile route from the Normandy beaches through the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg to Bastogne, Belgium, is known as the Road to Liberty.

By the first week of September Belgium had been freed of the Nazi yoke, and by the end of the month, South Limburg of The Netherlands. But there was much more bloody fighting ahead in the coming months before the war ended.

Benelux Underground Armies Fights Nazis

The people of the occupied Benelux countries did not simply sit and wait for the Allies to liberate them. Almost immediately after the fall of the Western armies in 1940, thousands of men and women risked their lives to surreptitiously fight the Nazi occupation forces any way possible. Capture could mean torture, execution or deportation to a slave labor camp. Many did lose their lives, but the resistance continued to grow. Often entire families were in the underground but in separate cells (usually no bigger than 10 persons), so they did not know until after the war they were all working for the common goal of defeating the Nazis.

Chièvres Air Base was under constant observation with the reports and photographs gathered at great risk sent to London for Allied intelligence. As the war turned against the Nazis, the underground armies became bolder in their attacks. The Germans exacted a heavy toll, executing immediately those captured; but the attacks continued. Underground “railroad” networks were also established, enabling hundreds of downed Allied airmen to make it back to England.

Belgian, Luxembourg and Dutch clandestine “underground armies” were instrumental in helping the Allies drive out the Nazis.

Chièvres Air Base and D-Day

Although the massive German airfield at Chièvres, Belgium, was under almost constant bombing attacks by Allied Air Forces from 1943 onward, the Luftwaffe still managed to get aircraft into the air and over the beaches of Normandy. It proved to be disastrous. All available aircraft were tossed into the fray, but from day one the crews were tasked with virtual suicidal missions. Facing thousands of ant-aircraft guns and thousands of swarming fighters over the beaches, German pilots knew the best they could do was to “bravely die for the Führer.”

The Allies, with their nimble yet heavily-armed fighters, such as Spitfires and Mustangs, made short work of the German bombers. One after another they fell in flames. The commander of one Chièvres-based

bomber group reported aircraft losses at more than 30 percent. Indeed, flying in a straight line for more than 10 minutes was suicide for any bomber crew.
With the Allies rapidly closing in, Chièvres airfield was abandoned. Two RAF planes touched down on Sept. 3, and the pilots confirmed the base was free of Germans. An American tank smashed through the perimeter fence shortly after.

Within a week, U.S. Army Engineers began to rebuild the airfield and fill in the thousands of bomb craters. The base was fully operational by Oct. 1 with various U.S. fighter groups setting up shop. They would be instrumental in providing air support to hard-pressed American forces during the upcoming Battle of the Bulge in December.

Allies Liberate Part of the Netherlands

The decimated remains of the German army withdrew through the Netherlands to regroup in the hopes of making a stand, defending the Dutch coal mines of South Limburg just on the border with Germany. But the 2nd Armored Division, Hell on Wheels, and the 30th Infantry Division, the Workhorse of the Western Front, gave them no rest.

Lead U.S. elements crossed the Mass River on Sept. 11, after taking the Belgian fortress of Eben Emael, and continued fiercely pounding the Germans. One division was pushed back into Germany losing 5,600 of 6,000 men. By the evening of Sept. 17, 1944, most of South Limburg had been liberated. That same day, Eisenhower used his airborne forces (The British 1st Airborne and the American 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions) to spearhead a dash for the north German plains before winter set in. However, the plan failed and the rest of the Netherlands had to endure a harsh winter before finally being liberated in the spring of 1945.

Belgian Fusiliers Join the Fight

After Belgium was liberated in September 1944, the government returned from exile in the United Kingdom and immediately began to reconstitute its military forces.

Men who had been members of the secret underground army flocked to the enlistment centers. On Oct. 9, 1944, the 5th Fusiliers Battalion was activated at Charleroi. The new Belgian army was outfitted with a mixed bag of British and American uniforms and equipment.

The liberated manpower was used to form 57 Fusilier (infantry) battalions, four engineer and four pioneer battalions, and 34 motor transport battalions. The bulk of the Fusilier battalions were used to secure rear areas. The presence of the lightly-equipped Belgian units allowed better-equipped Allied units to pursue combat operations. However, some 20 of the Fusilier battalions were used in combat in the Battle of the Bulge, in The Netherlands, at the Remagen Bridgehead and in Czechoslovakia at Pilsen. The 5th Fusilier Battalion is particularly remembered for its service with the U.S. Army during the Battle of the Bulge.

Operation Market-Garden
As the massive Allied armies rapidly moved east towards the German border in the fall of 1944, the problem was not supplies nor port facilities, but transportation of these military stores, particularly gas and ammunition. All supplies had to be moved from vast dumps in Normandy to the Allied armies now in Belgium and eastern France.

Even the circular one-way Red Ball Express trucking route from Normandy to the front and back fell short in delivering the tons of supplies needed daily. The lead elements were outrunning their supply lines and Patton’s tanks were running dangerously low on fuel. (Patton’s army could easily consume 400,000 gallons daily.) It was not uncommon for foraging parties to raid neighboring depots for gas to keep the tanks moving forward. Patton said it wasn’t war but still “magnificent.”

British General Bernard Law Montgomery developed a two-phase airborne and armored operation to shorten the war and sold the plan to Supreme Allied Commander, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. The ground phase, Garden, called for the British Second Army to outflank the German West Wall in an armored thrust aimed at Arnhem, The Netherlands.

In Operation Market, Allied airborne troops were to seize key waterways and railheads in advance of Montgomery’s tank column. Forcing their way across the lower Rhine was the Allies shortest route to Berlin and the end of Hitler. Although paratroopers captured several bridges and held the Arnhem bridge for several days, the joint operation failed, as the tanks did not reach the bridge before the German counterattack.

The Allies had not counted on the resilience of the Germany army. Much of The Netherlands would remain under the cruel Nazis for the next eight months. The war would not be over by Christmas after all. The front lines stabilized somewhat during that rainy, cold autumn as both sides regrouped and prepared for future battles of 1945.

Last Gasp of the Nazis

While the Allies were stalled on the border of Germany in the fall of 1944, Hitler carefully husbanded his last reserves of tanks and infantry for a desperate attempt to reverse the situation in the west. On Dec. 16, powerful German forces struck the lightly held sector of the U.S. First Army front, south of Monschau in the Ardennes. German armored spearheads drove toward the Meuse River, aiming at Antwerp. Aided by bad weather, a variety of deceptive measures, and the failure of Allied intelligence to correctly interpret the signs of an impending attack, they achieved complete surprise.

Elements of five U.S. divisions, plus support troops, fell back in confusion. Two regiments of the 106th Infantry Division, cut off and surrounded atop the mountainous Schnee Eiffel, surrendered. American forces were spread too thin and had few reserves to meet the attack.

Eisenhower ordered an airborne division into the important communications center of Bastogne, Belgium. By Dec. 18, the magnitude of the German effort was clear, and Eisenhower ordered Patton’s Third Army to disengage from its stalled offensive toward the Saar and to attack the enemy’s southern flank. Scattered American units, fighting desperate rearguard actions, disrupted the German timetable, obstructing or holding key choke points – road junctions, narrow defiles and single-lane bridges across unfordable streams – to buy time.

U.S. fighters from Chièvres flew countless ground support missions to stall the German drive. Once the weather cleared, the fighters were able to bomb and strafe German transportation all the way back to their starting points in Germany.

Short of fuel, denied critical roadnets, hammered by air attacks and confronted by American armor, the Nazi spearheads recoiled short of the Meuse. Meanwhile, Patton had altered the Third Army’s axis of advance and attacked northward, relieving Bastogne on Dec. 26.

On Jan. 3, 1945, First and Ninth Army troops and British forces launched attacks that sent the Germans reeling. By the end of January, the Allies had retaken all the ground lost, and the Battle of the Bulge was over. The Nazis would never return.

Find all the information about the 75th anniversary of WWII here.

Courtesy to the Gazette, with contributions from the below sources

- Delivered from Evil – by Robert Leckie
- D-Day in South Limburg by Jan Hendriks and Hans Koenen
- Encyclopedia of World War II by Thomas Parrish
- The Battle for the Rhine 1944 by Robin Neillands
- JU 88 by Krzysztof Janowicz
- History of Chièvres Air Base by Andre Neve and Firmin Lambrecht
- Stars and Stripes
- Benelux Meteor