The Road to Victory


SCHOOLS PAGE: A short history of World War Two 7 - The Road to Victory
1944: D-Day In June 1944, the Allies were ready to begin fighting the Germans in Europe once again. A massive invasion fleet of British, Canadian and American soldiers crossed the English Channel and landed on the beaches of France on 6th June 1944. This famous date in history is forever remembered as "D-Day".		D-Day: 6th June 1944 when the Allies landed on the beaches of France.
		The Germans were overwhelmed, and throughout the rest of that year the Allies pushed the German soldiers back out of France and Italy, liberating countries like Holland and Belgium along the way. This was despite sometimes losing many brave British, American and Polish soldiers during important battles at such places as Arnhem in Holland. At the same time, British and American bomber planes tried to bomb German factories which made weapons and vehicles that the Germans were using against their enemies. These included the V1 (called "Doodle-bug") and later V2 rocket weapons which had begun blasting parts of south-eastern England and London, killing hundreds of civilians. Left: Prime Minister Winston Churchill - famous for his victory speeches.
1945: Victory in Europe and Japan By 1945 the Allies had reached the western border of Germany, whilst the Russian Army had chased the Germans out of Poland and were heading across East Germany towards the capital city of Berlin. In his underground bunker in Berlin, Adolf Hitler became increasingly angry that his German troops could not prevent the Allies from defeating them in battle after battle. Eventually, ashamed of what he had done, Hitler and his new wife Eva Braun committed suicide, killing themselves by swallowing poison before they could be captured by the Russians who had arrived in Berlin itself.		By 1945, many cities throughout Europe lay in ruins, having been bombed and smashed to pieces in the fighting. When the war was over, it took many years for these cities to be rebuilt, in some cases over 30 years or more.
The first atomic bomb to be dropped was on the city of Hiroshima.		Without their leader ordering them what to do, the German forces surrendered a few days later and the war in Europe came to an end in May of that year. Everyone sang and danced in the streets of Britain and the rest of Europe in what became called "Victory in Europe Day" or "VE Day". It took another 6 months for the Japanese Army to surrender, which they did after America dropped the first two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These huge bombs flattened almost every building underneath them over a large area, killing thousands of people and inflicting horrible injuries on many others. This new kind of weapon was considered to be so terrible that after the Japanese surrendered, no atomic bomb has been used in the world since that time.

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