تهاجم متفقین غربی آلمان بخشی از نبردهای جبهه غربی جنگ جهانی دوم بود.
این عملیات که با همکاری تمام کشورهای متفق علیه آلمان انجام شد، به عنوان یکی از سرنوشت سازترین نبردهای جنگ جهانی دوم بود که همزمان با حمله جبهه شرقی باعث پایان یافتن جنگ جهانی در اروپا و سقوط رایش سوم شد.
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نقشه عبور از راین بین ۲۲ و ۲۸ مارس ۱۹۴۵
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هواپیمای
داگلاس سی-۴۷ اسکایترین و رها شدن چتربازها در طی
عملیات وارسیتی در ۲۴ مارس.
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تانکهای آمریکایی در کوبرگ در ۲۵ آوریل
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نقشه عملیات نهایی متفقین غربی بین ۱۹ آوریل و ۷ می ۱۹۴۵ و تغییرات در خط مقدم شوروی
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یک تانک بریتانیایی در هامبورگ ، ۴ می.
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موقعیت نهایی
متفقین و ارتش
شوروی، می ۱۹۴۵.
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فرودگاههای ایالات متحده در اروپا ، ۸ می ۱۹۴۵.
- ↑ Includes 25 armored divisions and 5 airborne divisions. Includes 61 American divisions, 13 British divisions, 11 French divisions, 5 Canadian divisions, and 1 Polish division, as well as several independent brigades. One of the British divisions arrived from Italy after the start of the campaign.
- ↑ "Tanks and AFV News", January 27, 2015. Zaloga gives the number of American tanks and tank destroyers as 11,000. The Americans comprised 2/3 of the Allied forces, and other Allied forces were generally equipped to the same standard.
- ↑ S. L. A. Marshall. ["ON HEAVYthi
ARTILLERY: AMERICAN EXPERIENCE IN FOUR WARS"]. Journal of the US Army War College. Page 10. "The ETO", a term generally only used to refer to American forces in the Western European Theater, fielded 42,000 pieces of artillery; American forces comprised approximately 2/3 of all Allied forces during the campaign.
- ↑ "Tanks and AFV News", January 27, 2015. Quoting an estimate given in an interview with Steven Zaloga.
- ↑ Alfred Price. Luftwaffe Data Book. Greenhill Books. 1997. Total given for serviceable Luftwaffe strength by April 9 1945 is 3,331 aircraft. See: Luftwaffe serviceable aircraft strengths (1940–45).
- ↑ * US General George Marshall estimated about 263,000 German battle deaths on the Western Front for the period from 6 June 1944 to 8 May 1945, or a longer period (George C Marshall, Biennial reports of the Chief of Staff of the United States Army to the Secretary of War : 1 July 1939-30 June 1945. Washington, DC : Center of Military History, 1996. Page 202 بایگانیشده در ۱ مه ۲۰۱۷ توسط Wayback Machine).
- West German military historian Burkhart Müller-Hillebrand (Das Heer 1933–1945 Vol 3. Page 262) estimated 265,000 dead from all causes and 1,012,000 missing and prisoners of war on all German battlefronts from Jan 1, 1945 - April 30, 1945. No breakdown of these figures between the various battlefronts was provided.
- US Army historian Charles B. MacDonald (The European Theater of Operations: The Last Offensive, Center of Military History, United States Army, Washington D.C. , 1993, page 478) holds that "exclusive of prisoners of war, all German casualties in the west from D-day to V–E Day probably equaled or slightly exceeded Allied losses". In the related footnote he writes the following: "The only specific figures available are from OB WEST for the period 2 June 1941–10 April 1945 as follows: Dead, 80,819; wounded, 265,526; missing, 490,624; total, 836,969. (Of the total, 4,548 casualties were incurred prior to D-day.) See Rpts, Der Heeresarzt im Oberkommando des Heeres Gen St d H/Gen Qu, Az. : 1335 c/d (IIb) Nr. : H.A. /263/45 g. Kdos. of 14 Apr 45 and 1335 c/d (Ilb) (no date, but before 1945). The former is in OCMH X 313, a photostat of a document contained in German armament folder H 17/207; the latter in folder 0KW/1561 (OKW Wehrmacht Verluste). These figures are for the field army only, and do not include the Luftwaffe and Waffen-SS. Since the Germans seldom remained in control of the battlefield in a position to verify the status of those missing, a considerable percentage of the missing probably were killed. Time lag in reporting probably precludes these figures’ reflecting the heavy losses during the Allied drive to the Rhine in March, and the cut-off date precludes inclusion of the losses in the Ruhr Pocket and in other stages of the fight in central Germany."
- German military historian Rüdiger Overmans (Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg, Oldenbourg 2000, pp.265-272) claims, based on extrapolations from a statistical sample (see German casualties in World War II), that the German armed forces suffered 1,230,045 deaths in the "Final Battles" on the Eastern and Western Fronts from January to May 1945. This figure is broken down as follows (p. 272): 401,660 fallen, 131,066 dead from other causes, 697,319 missing. The number of missing obviously includes soldiers who fell into captivity and died there, possibly months or years later. (The number of deaths in captivity calculated by Overmans is about 459,000, thereof 363,000 in Soviet captivity (p. 286). Overmans’ figure of deaths in Soviet captivity is about 700,000 lower than the number (ca. 1,094,000) established between 1962 and 1974 by a German government commission, the Maschke Commission. Overmans (pp. 288f.) considers it "plausible, though not provable" that these additional 700,000 perished in Soviet captivity.) Nevertheless, Overmans claims (pp. 275, 279) that all 1,230,045 deaths occurred during the period from January to May 1945. He states that about 2/3 of these deaths occurred on the Eastern Front (World War II), without explaining how he arrived at this proportion (according to Table 59 on p. 277, there were 883,130 deaths on the Eastern Front between June and December 1944, and according to Table 53 on p. 266 there were 244,891 deaths on the Western Front in the whole of 1944; the relation between these two figures is 78.29% in the East vs. 21.71% in the West). This would leave 410,000 deaths attributable to the Western Allied invasion between January and May 1945.
- ↑ Rüdiger Overmans, Soldaten hinter Stacheldraht. Deutsche Kriegsgefangene des Zweiten Weltkriege. Ullstein Taschenbuchvlg. , 2002. German POWs in Allied hands in the west are listed as numbering 920,000 in the first quarter of 1945. German POWs in the west numbered 4,209,840 by the time Germany surrendered (see Disarmed Enemy Forces). This would mean ~3.3 million German soldiers were captured from late March to early May.