On April 25, American and Soviet forces linked up on the Elbe River near Torgau, while the Soviet Army fought its way into the heart of Berlin. Nazi leaders in the bombed Cologne Cathedral. The National WWII Museum, Gift of Dylan Utley, 2012.019.243As the American bomber fleet and its fighter escorts approached the German capital, more than 70 German fighters intercepted the invaders. Eventually, as the war began to conclude, American and British forces took the city following a battle from April 1st through 2nd, 1945.

These raids resulted in severe fires, the deaths of at least 10,000 inhabitants of the city, and the destruction of much of the city center. Conservative estimates put German losses around 3,000 civilians. 178 Americans were killed, wounded, or captured in the raid. A German Me 262 jet fighter after crash landing in 1945. General Curtis LeMay, newly appointed as the head of B-29 operations, called for a change in tactics. On March 18, 1945, the biggest wartime bombing raid on Berlin showed that the German air force was still a dangerous and defiant foe.In the spring of 1945, German forces were reeling from a series of devastating defeats on the eastern and western fronts. In the west, US forces contained and repelled a German counteroffensive in the Battle of the Bulge. Historical event: 10. In the east, decimated German units retreated in the face of Soviet assaults on a front that stretched from Yugoslavia to Lithuania. The Americans used incendiary bombs, so Tokyo was caught up in a firestorm. In the west, Germany launched thousands of V-2 rockets at targets in the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. German civilians and Allied servicemen walk past a row of destroyed buildings in Berlin after Germany's surrender on May 8, 1945. Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum.In the spring of 1945, the Anglo-American air forces launched increasingly bigger and more destructive raids on German cities. It wasn’t B-17 Flying Fortresses that did the job, as Marshall had predicted, but the new long-distance B-29s based in Saipan and Tinian. The National WWII Museum, Gift in Memory of Rayford Edwin Alexander, 2010.275.098Despite the German Luftwaffe’s success, it was unable to prevent the vast majority of the American bombers from dropping their payloads on Berlin. Similarly, the British and American air campaign against Germany did not show any signs of abating in March 1945. Historian Tami Biddle argued that the United States Strategic Air Forces’ “wide-ranging targeting choices for the month of February revealed an almost desperate quest for a decisive use of strategic air power.” The same could be said of the March 18 raid, which had an undetermined impact on Germany’s defeat. More than 3,000 of the rockets struck Allied-held territory by March 1945, killing in excess of 4,500 people. The National WWII Museum, Gift of Peggy Wallace, 2010.308.031The armada next encountered German flak, which inflicted even more casualties. Owing to the previous devastation of Berlin and the untold number of refugees in the city, it is impossible to know the exact number of Germans killed in the raid. David Irving would claim in his 1963 book, The Destruction of Dresden, that the bombing was “the biggest single massacre in European history.” … Despite being outnumbered 25 to 1, the German fighters used cloud cover to evade the American fighter escort and close with the bomber formations. March 1945; About 100,000 people were killed during the U.S. bombing of Tokyo, so that attack was even deadlier than nuclear strikes on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. On March 7, units of the American 9th Armored Division captured the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen and established a bridgehead over the Rhine River, the largest remaining obstacle confronting American forces in their drive into Germany. The March 9 raid, code-named “Operation Meetinghouse,” marked a shift in American bombing strategy. Yet the belated appearance of the best fighter of the war could not prevent Germany’s ultimate defeat. 16 suffered hits so severe that they had to crash land behind Soviet lines. The German jets each carried two dozen rockets slung under their wings. His idea was known as the ‘Thousand Plan’. 1964.

Citizens of Hitler’s Third Reich also could not escape the horrors of war.

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