Operation Varsity E-Book

Captivating History

• Herausgeber: Captivating History
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 63

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Operation Varsity: The Final Airborne Assault of World War II   One river. One daring drop. One last chance to crush Nazi Germany. In the spring of 1945, as Allied forces closed in on Hitler's collapsing empire, one final major barrier remained: the Rhine River. Beyond it lay the industrial core of Germany and the fading but fierce hope of Nazi resistance. To break through, Allied commanders launched Operation Varsity, the largest single-day airborne assault of World War II. Thousands of paratroopers and glider-borne soldiers from the British 6th Airborne and American 17th Airborne divisions flew across the Rhine and into one of the most dangerous, high-stakes missions of the entire conflict. What made this operation different?  Everything.   Inside this book, you'll discover:  -  The political and military pressures that made Operation Varsity unavoidable.  -  Why the Rhine was far more than a river and why it was Germany's final wall.  -  How thousands of troops and tons of equipment were coordinated and dropped with remarkable precision.  -  What failed in earlier airborne operations, and how Varsity transformed those lessons into success.  -  How Varsity's victory opened the path to the Ruhr and ultimately Berlin.  -  Why this often overlooked battle deserves recognition among the war's decisive turning points.  -  And much more!    Packed with gripping detail, strategic insight, and human drama,  Operation Varsity illuminates a bold yet frequently forgotten chapter of World War II. If you love real-life military history, this is the battle you need to know. Click  Add to Cart to relive the drop that helped end the war.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Operation Varsity

Chapter One: The War from D-Day

Chapter Two: At the Rhine

Chapter Three: The Plan

Chapter Four: Operation Varsity

Conclusion

Bibliography

Endnotes

Operation Varsity

A Captivating Guide to the Largest Airborne Assault in World War II That Sealed the Fate of Nazi Germany

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Introduction

In the late 100s BCE, the Roman Empire began expanding into what is now France (known then as “Gallia” or “Gaul” by the Romans). Fifty or so years later, the famous Julius Caesar defeated the Gallic tribes in Alesia in north-central France. Around 160 miles from the battlefield was the Rhine River.

The second-longest river in Europe, the Rhine was the unofficial border between what was known to the Romans and what was not. On the west side of the Rhine was the Roman Empire. On the eastern side was “Terra Incognita”—the “unknown land.”

In actuality, the Romans knew little about the other side of the Rhine, including its inhabitants, the various Germanic tribes. In 55 BCE and again in 53 BCE, Caesar crossed the Rhine on engineered bridges that likely told the tribes on the other side that these new people on their border were not to be taken lightly. In 53 BCE, Caesar’s troops crossed the Rhine on one of these bridges, pursuing the Germanic Eburones tribe and their allies, but he soon returned to the other side, having established a Roman presence on the left bank of the Rhine.

Almost forty years later, in the time of Julius Caesar’s adopted son, Augustus, Rome began building a series of fortified outposts and trading posts on the west side of the wide river, hoping to stabilize their empire in northwest Europe and secure better trading routes from north to south. However, in 11 BCE, an alliance of Germanic tribes crossed the Rhine and moved against Roman forces along the Lippe River, which runs west to east as an offshoot of the Rhine, beginning near the present-day city of Wesel.

After these battles, most (but not all) of which were won by the Romans, the tribes retired back across the Rhine and prepared for what they knew was coming: Roman expansion deeper into today’s Germany. As Rome slowly expanded east into the lands between the Rhine and Elbe Rivers, a Germanic chieftain, known to the Romans as Arminius, helped unite the Germanic tribes (which often fought one another) and marched against a large Roman force of three legions (approximately fifteen thousand men). The Romans under General Publius Quinctilius Varus fell into Arminius’s trap and were lured ever deeper into the forests east of the Rhine. At the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE (“Teutoburger Wald” in German), between twenty and thirty thousand Germans fell on Varus’s slightly smaller force and practically annihilated it.

After the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, the Romans ceased all of their attempts to cross the Rhine in force and conquer Germany. They were content to remain on the western side of the river to trade and prevent Germanic incursions into Gaul.

Almost two thousand years later, other invaders sat on the west bank of the Rhine, waiting to move into the heart of Germany. This time, hundreds of thousands of Allied troops, supported by overwhelming resources, stood ready to cross and strike deep into Adolf Hitler’s Germany.

Operation Varsity was a key component in getting across the Rhine River. It was centered around the small city of Wesel, near where the Germans had attacked the Romans nearly two thousand years before. However, this time, the Germans’ enemy was twenty or thirty thousand men with swords and shields. Facing the Germans across the Rhine were hundreds of thousands of men backed up by a seemingly limitless amount of supplies, guns, planes, tanks, and more. Among those hundreds of thousands of men were just under twenty thousand men who would drop from the sky.

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Chapter One: The War from D-Day

For about a month and a half after the June 6th D-Day landings, the Allies struggled to break out of their bridgehead in Normandy to capture the Channel ports to the west and begin a drive toward Paris to the east. For weeks, Allied forces had been battling the Germans in the “hedgerow country” of Normandy. Every small advance was made at a high price.

In late July, General Omar Bradley, who had fought in North Africa and Sicily earlier in the war and was the overall field commander for United States ground forces in Normandy, devised a plan to get the Allies moving again. This plan was Operation Cobra, which called for intensive saturation bombing of a relatively small area of the southern part of the Allied perimeter. A mix of seven armored and infantry divisions pushed through the main German line in the American sector of operations. The way was now open for a massive and speedy push out of Normandy.

Members of the 12th SS “Hitlerjugend” Division in Caen, early August 1944

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79564716

To the north of the Allied bridgehead near Omaha and Utah beaches were the British and Canadians, as well as sizable Polish and Free French units. Their situation was as bad or worse than what the Americans were facing in their bridgehead. Not only were the British facing the same types of rural geography that their American allies were, but they were also facing a more urban environment. Most of the towns, especially the historic city of Caen, were major road hubs, and the Germans’ control of them meant that Allied advances were slow and terribly bloody. The British had assaulted Caen (once controversially bombing it nearly into rubble) a number of times. Each time, they ground down the Germans in and near the city a little more, but the price was extraordinarily high, and soldiers weren’t the only ones to pay that price. Perhaps three thousand civilians were killed in the small city, caught in Allied bombing, shelling, and the fighting that raged from street to street when British forces finally entered Caen at the end of the first week in August.