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Death in the West: The Battle of the Ruhr Pocket | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans
The Ruhr Pocket campaign of April 1945 ended Germany',s hopes—and established the US Army.
Death in the West: The Battle of the Ruhr Pocket.
The Ruhr Pocket campaign of April 1945 ended Germany's hopes—and established the US Army.
Think of World War II as a tale of two armies.
The German Wehrmacht dominated the fighting early, but had gone downhill ever since.
By 1945, losses were soaring, replacements weren't keeping up, and much of the German army consisted of Volkssturm (People's Assault) units, old men and boys from the Reich with sketchy training and equipment.
German weapons—Tiger tanks and ME-262 jet aircraft—might be quite advanced, but the men at the front rarely saw enough of them to make a difference.
Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, German supreme commander in the west, once complained that leading German armies this late in the war was like playing a Beethoven sonata on an old, rickety, out of tune piano." The US Army joined the war late and stumbled in its debuts in North Africa and Italy.
By 1945, however, the Americans were as seasoned and professional as anyone in the field.
Their material support—weapons, fuel, ammunition, food—was lavish.
US officials liked to brag that the G.I.
was "the best-paid and best-fed soldier" of all time.
Bristling with modern equipment and vehicles—tanks, halftracks, self-propelled artillery—the US Army was both mobile and lethal.
If an American unit found a seam in enemy defenses, it could slash through like lightning, and once in contact, could hurl more brute firepower than any force in history.
The amount of artillery the Americans rained down on their enemies never ceased to shock the Germans, whose own artillery had to be more selective about what they obliterated.
Finally, US commanders had waves of fighters and fighter-bombers like the P-47 Thunderbolt or P-51 Mustang that made it nearly impossible for the Germans to move in daylight.
By 1945, the US Army may have been the most effective ground force in history.
In 1945, all these advantages came together in the greatest American victory of World War II.
The battle of the Ruhr Pocket has never won the attention it deserves, but it was something rare in military history.
World War II was messy and unpredictable, and plans rarely worked out the way the generals conceived them.
In the Ruhr, however, the US Army lived the dream: establishing full-spectrum dominance to win decisive victory at minimal cost.
The western allies were a bit slow off the mark in 1945.
The supreme commander, General Dwight D.
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