ABSTRACT
The last part of the Second World War was more long-drawn-out than that of the First. From the allied invasion of Europe in June 1944 to Hitler's suicide on 30 April 1945 and the final surrender of the Nazi forces in May, victory was anticipated any day, with mounting impatience. Hitler's ‘secret weapons’, the terrifying VI and V2 flying bombs and rockets, which pursued their pilotless flight to arbitrary destinations by day or night from June 1944 till the end of March 1945, made the end all the more urgently desired. But there were set-backs, at Arnhem in Belgium, where strong Nazi resistance turned back the allied advance in September 1944 and in the Ardennes, where a Nazi counter-offensive was launched in December. The devastation in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany caused by saturation bombing and the malnutrition and hardships suffered by the civilian populations under Nazi rule, especially the inmates of Nazi concentration camps, did not make progress any easier, and deeply moved many of the British servicemen and women who witnessed them. But the Allies made better progress in the spring of 1945, the Russians broke through the Nazi defences in the east in February and March, and in Italy the dictator Mussolini was shot on 28 April. By now the end of the war in Europe was imminent.
