Cartoons from The Saturday Evening Post during the Second World War

(Source: saturdayeveningpost.com)

January 25, 2013, 2:00pm / 141

August 07, 2012, 4:48pm / 37

6 June 1944, 160,000 Allied troops landed along a 50-mile stretch of heavily-fortified French coastline to fight Nazi Germany on the beaches of Normandy, France. Codenamed Operation Overlord, General Dwight D. Eisenhower called the operation a crusade in which “we will accept nothing less than full victory.”

More than 5,000 ships and 13,000 aircraft supported the D-Day invasion, and by day’s end the Allies gained a foot-hold in Fortress Europe. The cost was high though—more than 9,000 Allied soldiers were killed or wounded, but their sacrifice allowed more 100,000 soldiers to begin the long march across Europe to defeat Hitler and bring the Third Reich to its knees.

June 06, 2012, 12:40am / 122

Although D-Day had given the Anglo-Allies a beachhead in Fortress Europa, it took them almost two months of bitter, brutal fighting for them to break out of the infamous Normandy hedgerows. After that though the Anglo-Allied armies raced across France, liberating every town and village between them and Paris before heading towards the German frontier. However, the rapid pace of the advance placed a severe strain on the Allied logistics, which along with bad weather, stretched supply lines and stiffening German resistance, slowed to a crawl near the Ardennes.

By December, the Anglo-Allies armies had reached the Roer River inside Germany and the West Wall along the Saar River in eastern France. Between these two fronts lay the Ardenne, a hilly, densely forested area in the country of Belgium. Claimed to be impassable by both the French and Belgium armies, the Germans had attacked their French foe through the very region in 1940 successfully. That month, five American divisions and a cavalry group held the 85-mile-long Ardenne against an enemy that wasn’t expected. It was believed by the Allied commanders that the combination of the difficult terrain and the falsely propagated idea that the German army was near exhaustion, the Ardenne sector was safe and secure. It is because of this that three of the five divisions placed on the line were new, full of green soldiers who had only recently arrived in Europe and had never seen combat; the other two divisions were full recuperating from the heavy losses suffered in the brutal fighting during the Battle of the Huertgen Forest.

After months of retreat, Hitler had decided (against the word of his generals) that a bold gamble was needed to regain the West. Under the cover of the winter weather, German forces amassed some 25 divisions opposite the Ardenne and planned to crash through the thinly held American front, cross the Meuse River and drive into the city of Antwerp. If the offensive succeeded, it would split the British and American armies and, Hitler hoped, finally force the British out of the war.

So, before daybreak on 16 December 1944, the Third Reich launched its last ditch offensive on the Western front, completely surprising the American divisions in the Ardenne and beginning what would be known to history as the Battle of the Bulge.

September 14, 2011, 12:00pm / 17