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Allied tanks break out of Normandy to complete the liberation of Northern France, August 1944 - AN19900198-132
Allied tanks break out of Normandy to complete the liberation of Northern France, August 1944.

The North West Europe Campaign, 1944-1945

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Joseph Stalin repeatedly demanded that the western Allies open a "Second Front" in western Europe to relieve pressure on his Eastern Front, where the Russian Army faced the Germans in brutal combat. He had to wait until mid-1944.

On 15 August 1944, before D-Day and the Normandy Campaign were completed, the American Seventh Army landed on the French Mediterranean coast and drove north to link up with the Allied forces in Normandy. The Free French 2nd Armoured Division liberated Paris on August 22. In the long campaign to drive the Germans completely out of the territory it occupied and to invade Germany itself, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Anglo-American Supreme Commander, pursued a "broad front" strategy. All the Allied armies advanced together, in order to employ their ever-increasing superiority in matTriel both on the ground and in the air.

The First Canadian Army, commanding at various times American, British, Czech and Polish formations who outnumbered the Canadians, fought along the left flank of this advance, clearing or bypassing the Channel ports, fighting heavily in the approaches to Antwerp and throughout the Netherlands ( see The Liberation of the Netherlands ). The final months of the war saw the Canadians fighting within northern Germany in the Rhineland and advancing to the North Sea. 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, a part of the British 6th Airborne Division and operating away from the other Canadians, advanced the furthest into Germany. It met the Russians advancing from the east at Wismer on the Baltic Sea on 2 May 1945.

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