Hitler believed he could exploit the unease between the Anglo-Americans and the Soviets to achieve a negotiated peace with the US and Britain which not only would preserve the Nazi regime, but allow him to concentrate solely on the war on the eastern front. The Germans could then methodically destroy the Western armies. Hitler recognized a potential opportunity to pull German victory out of the Allies grasp with a last roll of the dice: he would launch a winter offensive through a weak point in the Allied lines in the Ardennes, drive to Antwerp in Belgium, taking the port city and splitting the British army to the north from the American army in the south.
The Germans were secretly massing an attack force under cover of night and radio silence. Even though the Allied advance had slowed in the Hurtgen Forest and Vosges mountains, there was still the sense that the war was nearly won and ultimate victory was very near as the year drew to a close.Īdolf Hitler had other plans. In Europe, the successful D-Day landings had given way to the liberation of France and Allied forces now were into Holland and Belgium, poised along the German border.Ī sense of overconfidence began to infect the Allied leadership, where some even predicted that the war would be over by Christmas. As 1944 was drawing to a close, the Allied forces could look back on a year of great strides towards victory over the Axis powers.
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